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My own venture through almost 500 pages of Salmon poets was in many ways made as a foreigner, an awestruck linguistic outsider. Lendennie has assembled a democratic anthology of three poems from each of 106 poets she’s published — well-known and lesser known — and provided us with bios, then sent us on our way to identify with the familiar or sample new voices from beyond the breakwaters.
I am drawn to people with an environmental and community ethic, who believe in family and realize that family takes many forms, and who value free thought and the right to express thoughts in eloquent and sometimes daring, even painful ways. Kishkan is this type of person, I am sure, because the essays collected in Phantom Limb are full of the experiences, wonderfully told, of a woman discovering herself and her place among environments and cultures that cannot help but define her.
This is important: Richard Mabey is a man who wakes up in the morning and looks out the window for birds. He knows the names of the winged animals he sees — lapwing, swift, pheasant — and the ones he doesn’t see. He knows where they go when they fly south for the winter, what route they take, what they eat on the way. He is fascinated by ecosystems and woodlands, and reading his book I realized I was reading the work of one of those polymaths who were supposed to have disappeared around the time Queen Victoria died.
When I first received the large book (13x11 inches and nearly two inches thick), I found it beautiful but — in an age of high-definition television, wireless internet, and near virtual reality video games — wondered how it could compete. My question wasn’t as fundamental as whether books matter, but rather whether coffee table books still matter. After watching BBC’s amazing Planet Earth series, how can a flat book compare to the sights and sounds of a plasma flat screen?
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