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| Category: Environment |
(requires Adobe Reader)
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| About the Book | |
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The Other End of the Driveway collects together short essays from Dana Wilde’s popular Amateur Naturalist column on the flora, fauna, weather and weirdness that cycle through the seasons of the great northeast, mostly his home in Waldo County, Maine. Following trails blazed by writers like Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard, The Other End of the Driveway “peers long at the night sky [and topics ranging from] spring peepers, goldenrod, autumn leaves, and winter cold, to reflections on naming cats and wild grasses, to the shapes of snowflakes, spider webs, and Maine coastline,” says editor and poet Bruce Holsapple. “One is instantly taken up by Wilde’s affection for this ‘natural’ world, but even more so by the graceful way these backyard meditations unfold, one sparkling sentence after another.” These essays offer unusual and commonplace facts about leaves or birds or stars or apparitions in fields as windows to the various brightnesses of the universe. Taking direction from Thoreau, the natural facts are asked to blossom into perceptions of the truth of our relationship and experience of nature – which is a multidimensional kind of brightness radiating from we have no idea where into we have no idea where. The Other End of the Driveway offers sketches and maps of these whereabouts, glimpsed in the woods of central Maine.
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| About the Author | |
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Dana Wilde of Troy, Maine, writes the award-winning Amateur Naturalist column for the Bangor Daily News. His writings on nature, literature and the cosmos have appeared in magazines, newspapers and journals from Maine to Eastern Europe to China. |