Authors: Lorraine Anderson, Lorraine Anderson
ISBN-13: 9781400033218, ISBN-10: 1400033217
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date Published: December 2003
Edition: Revised
Lorraine Anderson is a freelance editor, writer, and teacher whose work focuses on encouraging a reciprocal relationship with nature. She served as lead editor of the college textbook Literature and the Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture (1998) and collaborated with Thomas Edwards on the anthology At Home on This Earth: Two Centuries of U.S. Women's Nature Writing (2002). She holds a B.A in English from the University of Utah and an M.S. in creation sprituality from Naropa University, and lives in Davis, California.
Sisters of the Earth is a stirring collection of women’s writing on nature: Nature as healer. Nature as delight. Nature as mother and sister. Nature as victim. Nature as companion and reminder of what is wild in us all. Here, among more than a hundred poets and prose writers, are Diane Ackerman on the opium of sunsets; Ursula K. Le Guin envisioning an alternative world in which human beings are not estranged from their planet; and Julia Butterfly Hill on weathering a fierce storm in the redwood tree where she lived for more than two years. Here, too, are poems, essays, stories, and journal entries by Emily Dickinson, Alice Walker, Terry Tempest Williams, Willa Cather, Gretel Erlich, Adrienne Rich, and others—each offering a vivid, eloquent response to the natural world.
This second edition of Sisters of the Earth is fully revised and updated with a new preface and nearly fifty new pieces, including new contributions by Louise Erdrich, Pam Houston, Zora Neale Hurston, Starhawk, Joy Williams, Kathleen Norris, Rita Dove, and Barbara Kingsolver.
The voices of nearly 100 women--white, black, Native American--sing out in this luminous anthology, which spans centuries, genres and literary careers from Willa Cather's to Sue Hubbell's. The thread that binds together the poetry, short stories and essays collected here is the harmonious relationship between women and nature that is about ``caring rather than controlling,'' as editor Anderson indicates. In her poem ``My Help Is in the Mountainsic ,'' Nancy Wood ( Hollering Sun ) becomes part of the sun-warmed rock that soothes her ``earthly wounds.'' In a prose reflection, ``The Miracle of Renewal,'' Laura Lee Davidson is rejuvenated by a year spent in the Canadian woods in 1914, which provided her with a ``gallery of mind-pictures.'' Both Linda Hogan's essay, ``Walking,'' and Elizabeth Coatsworth's poem, ``On the Hills,'' seek and find continuity in nature, as well as a kinship with the other times and places that is evoked by it. Taste and sensitivity are evident throughout the volume, whether tacit as nocturnal solitude or vocal as a feline ``howl . . . for the flame of yellow moons'' in Judith Minty's poem, ``Why Do You Keep Those Cats?'' Anderson is a freelance writer and editor. QPB selection. (Apr.)
Preface to the Second Edition | ||
Preface to the First Edition | ||
Fire | 3 | |
Beginning with a Place | 4 | |
The Joy-Song of Nature | 7 | |
The First Roots Creep Up | 10 | |
Blossoming Pear Tree | 12 | |
Breaklight | 14 | |
Believing the Bond | 15 | |
Luna | 19 | |
The South Corner | 22 | |
A White Heron | 23 | |
Being Still | 36 | |
Home to the Wilderness | 37 | |
The Magnolia Tree | 45 | |
A Breeze Swept Through | 48 | |
The Many and the One | 50 | |
I Will Lie Down | 52 | |
Rolling Naked in the Morning Dew | 57 | |
A Rinse in the River | 59 | |
Sandstone Seduction | 62 | |
River, O River | 65 | |
Christmas in Driftwood Valley | 66 | |
Jaunt from Nulato | 71 | |
Visual Opium | 74 | |
Why? | 77 | |
Spring in the City | 78 | |
Childhood on White Island | 84 | |
Green Thoughts in a Green Shade | 88 | |
My Mississippi Spring | 90 | |
A Bouquet of Wild Flowers | 91 | |
Glimpses of Salem | 94 | |
On the Hills | 98 | |
Trek to Blue Lake | 99 | |
Night in the Country | 104 | |
Love Poem | 108 | |
Why Do You Keep Those Cats? | 113 | |
Gabimichigami | 114 | |
Looking for Abbey's Lion | 117 | |
The Recognition | 121 | |
The Source of a River | 123 | |
Wilderness in the Blood | 127 | |
Annunciation | 129 | |
A Different Sympathy | 142 | |
Night Song | 144 | |
Becoming Feral | 146 | |
The Safety Behind Me | 150 | |
In the Open | 151 | |
The Feel of the Outdoors | 153 | |
In a Valley of Peace | 160 | |
The Angry Lunch Cafe | 161 | |
The Storm | 166 | |
The Old One and the Wind | 169 | |
My Help Is in the Mountain and Earth Cure Me | 173 | |
The Ancient People | 174 | |
Journal Entries | 186 | |
Daystar | 191 | |
The Bowl | 193 | |
Lesson 1 and Lesson 2 | 197 | |
State of Grace | 198 | |
Cured by Flowers | 201 | |
Meadow Turf | 205 | |
The Nature Cure - For the Body | 206 | |
Longing | 210 | |
The Balsam Fir | 212 | |
The Back-Road | 222 | |
My Desert Pond | 224 | |
The Miracle of Renewal | 228 | |
Depression in Winter | 231 | |
Come into Animal Presence | 235 | |
The Heart's Fox | 236 | |
Happiness | 242 | |
Sudden Knowing | 244 | |
The Word | 246 | |
To Build a Dam | 249 | |
Two Creatures of the Long-Shadowed Forest | 252 | |
The Fawn | 258 | |
Feathered Philosophers | 259 | |
A Sadness | 262 | |
A Little Nomad | 264 | |
A Wonder Tale | 270 | |
Drama on a Wooden Fence | 280 | |
Houseguest | 283 | |
Dance of Giants | 288 | |
Changing | 294 | |
Among My Closet Friends | 295 | |
The Old Cherry Tree | 300 | |
In Praise of Trees | 310 | |
The Man | 315 | |
The Last Antelope | 317 | |
The Hunt and Use | 327 | |
Audubon | 332 | |
Who? | 334 | |
Earth's Green Mantle | 336 | |
Bonelight | 342 | |
Love Canal | 346 | |
The Alegria Canyon and Afterword | 350 | |
When Earth becomes an "It" | 358 | |
The Hewers of Wood | 359 | |
Fallen Forests | 365 | |
Bitter Root Rituals, Stanzas I, II, and III | 368 | |
Clearcut | 371 | |
Contradictions: Tracking Poems, Part 18 | 374 | |
Spirit of Love | 379 | |
Turning to Another Way | 380 | |
Eve Revisited | 384 | |
The Rainbow Bridge | 386 | |
Kopis'taya (A Gathering of Spirits) | 392 | |
Declaration of the Four Sacred Things | 394 | |
Native Origin | 396 | |
The Common Living Dirt | 400 | |
What Holds the Water, What Holds the Light | 403 | |
Amazing Grace | 408 | |
Dynamics | 414 | |
End of the Beginning | 416 | |
Mind in the Waters | 423 | |
May's Lion | 425 | |
Demeter | 435 | |
Acknowledgments | 437 | |
Bibliography and Further Reading | 439 | |
Index of Authors and Titles | 457 |