Transparent Mountain: Ecopoetry from the Great Smokies (Paperback)

Description

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Transparent Mountain engages heart and spirit in a Smoky Mountains landscape that no longer physically exists, but that can be experienced intuitively and through the book's rich, evocative writing. It is part of the American vision to engage with the wilderness (Whitman, Thoreau, Bartram, Muir, Snyder) but this work looks, engaging natural history, ancient Chinese poetry, and Buddhism, through environmental disaster to the “original mind” of the wilderness. Loss Pequeño Glazier touches on its deep geologic history, first Indian inhabitants, its repeated destruction, its contemporary condition, and its many living creatures and geographic enchantments, thus painting a vibrant mural of its living present. The Smoky Mountains, Appalachians, and Blue Ridge vistas, all part of the landscape, sometimes present the illusion of seeing through a mountain chain to the one behind it. Through Glazier's evocative and playful writing, you also look through these mountains and sense their former splendor, joy, and spirit, what being transparent is all about. Let the ancient mountain majesty resonate wildly in the presence of your own spirit!

About the Author

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Poet Loss Pequeño Glazier is a multilingual woodland poet who has spent years writing, teaching, and roving heart-spirit landscapes in Berkeley, Paris, India, Mexico, Cuba, Buffalo, and the Blue Ridge/Southern Appalachians. Works include Luna Lunera: Poems al-Andalus, Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm and Digital Poetics: the Making of E-Poetries. Glazier, Professor Emeritus from SUNY Buffalo, served for 25 years as the director of the Electronic Poetry Center and was director of the E-Poetry Festivals (Buffalo, London, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires) and UB's Digital Poetry & Dance. Glazier lives and writes full-time in the vitalizing bio-diversity of the Smoky Mountains.

Praise For…

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As the name Han Shan is associated with Cold Mountain, Loss Pequeño Glazier will be bound up with the transparent Smokies. – John Shoptaw (Times Beach, “Why Ecopoetry”)

Transparent Mountain is a magnum opus of eco-poetry, an ecstatic vision of a living, breathing earth. Chock full of marvelous sense data met with a calm disposition of deep spiritual understanding, Loss Pequeño Glazier’s perspective from a cabin in the Smoky Mountains embraces earth and sky, mountain and river, sea and stone, mind and matter, Basho and Muir, self and non-self. – Kit Robinson (Quarantina)

Immersion in this river of words is a baptism into nature, carrying the reader away into worlds, universes, and mini-verses where oceans are mountains, mountains are whales, whales are clouds, and nothing is ever motionless because all are atoms and atoms are energy and energy is all. – Chris Bolgiano (The Appalachian Forest)

A sutra of words flowing through a sylvan watershed, one line reflecting the Cosmos, the next slowing for an eddy of human flotsam, pausing for an Archimedean commentary, then pressing on humming hosannas for the spindrift sea. – Red Pine (Zen Roots: The First Thousand Years)

Loss Pequeño Glazier's new epic poem is an incredible statement on the power of observation, and attention to place. Much in the spirit of William Bartram, it is full of both love and lamentation for these southern mountains and for all of life on this amazing planet. – Brent Martin (Brent Martin, Executive Director, Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy