Wild Delicate Seconds de Charles Finn

Wild Delicate Seconds: 29 Wildlife Encounters

Charles Finn

In Wild Delicate Seconds, Charles Finn captures twenty-nine chance encounters with the everyday—and not so everyday—animals, birds, and insects of North America.

There are no maulings or fantastic escapes in Finn's narratives—only stillness and attentiveness to beauty. With profundity, humor, and compassion, Finn pays homage to the creatures we share our world with —from black bears to bumble bees, mountain lions to muskrats—and, in doing so, touches on what it means to be human.

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Recenzii

"Wild Delicate Seconds is an exquisite read, full of small surprises with big heartbeats. Finn’s stories are warbler-sized. They cut through the air of the mind like flames."— Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces and The Future of Ice

"I don’t know when I have felt more captive to a suite of animal associations than I do in reading Wild Delicate Seconds. I think of Ernest Thompson Seton, both Adolf and Olaus Murie, and all of the Craigheads, written with the elegant concision of Penelope Fitzgerald and the wild whimsy of Tom Robbins. But this is Charles Finn, all by himself, except for the company of 29 memorable creatures—all the more memorable for his gem-like accounts of intimate meetings in the wild. Finn’s mastery of simile, his deep, deep attention to others around him, and his humility in the presence of his evolutionary peers make this a fine book, one I shall read over and over, give away again and again, and return to wπhen I am lonely." — Robert Michael Pyle, author of Mariposa Road and The Thunder Tree

"These brief meditations are as beautiful for what they don’t say as for what they do. Charles Finn does not pad, overreach, or over-emote. His precision accounts of wildlife encounters summon awe, wonder, and magnificence when those feelings are authentically present, but just as readily summon comedy if the encounter was, as Edward Hoagland once put it, 'like meeting a fantastically dressed mute on the road.' These are not fleeting glances: they are full-on full-bodied face-to-face invocations of the way animals and birds 'speak out by saying precisely nothing,' uncannily propelling us into 'the exact place where the world begins.'"? — David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and My Story as Told by Water

"In the space of these twenty-nine encounters, Charles Finn invites his readers into a landscape of 'uncountable geometries, great silences,' a primordial terrain in which 'hunger is the beginning of everything.' Here, a crane’s flight is 'the old machinery of the world lifting into the sky.' Here, we experience moments so stunning 'there is no restarting the heart.' Finn gives us the quality of intense seeing that transcends into insight, seeing that transforms into vision. In the encounter with ravens, he reminds us of what poets tell us: 'Everything… shouts one thing, and one thing only, "Pay attention!"' And Charles Finn does. Indeed, he does. His words pay a rapt and rapturous attention." — Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate

"When I know the name of a creature, Thoreau said, I find it difficult to see. Charles Finn has escaped that disability, and done magic: to summon the moment of encounter with a wild creature without killing that drama with too much mind. The feral moments in this book are deft, alive with exact detail, full, and short. This is a field guide to a different kind of outside, where the wise, wide-eyed child of the self meets ouzel, turtle, fox, and owl. We need more big short books like this one—after reading Finn, you will wander alert, humbled, wise." — Kim Stafford, author of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft

"Wild Delicate Seconds is invaluable. Straightforwardly and precisely articulated, it reinforces our sense that we live next door to mysteries while inhabiting profound complexities, and that we should spend time thanking our lucky stars —and Charles Finn."— William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky

Notă biografică

CHARLES FINN is editor of High Desert Journal. His writing is published in more than fifty newspapers, journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Sun, Open Spaces, Northern Lights, Big Sky Journal, and High Country News. He taught English as a foreign language in Hiroshima, Japan; hid out in the woods of British Columbia; and learned the art of deconstruction in Potomac, Montana. Originally from Vermont and a recent resident of Bend, Oregon, he now lives in New Jersey.

Extras

Great Blue Heron

The heron is in the world and I am in the world. It is early morning, mist moves across the open fields of the slough. Above me gray clouds form a blowing, shifting ceiling, while at my feet a dirt path curves like a brown snake around the roots of the trees. All is quiet, only the gentle stirrings of the cattails and the dry click of the reeds. I come here on such mornings with no plan, no desire for the day to be other than it will.

This morning I find myself one hundred yards away from a great blue heron. It looks like a hunched stone, an oval of waiting. The heron stands in shallow water statue-still, two feet tall, silent, reticent, and flower-like, hunkered down among the vertical stems of the reeds like an escapee from a Ming Dynasty painting. In a motion so smooth I would like to applaud, I watch it raises its head, unfolding its accordion neck into a slender S. Like Narcissus it leans out over its reflection. Then it lifts a single foot and places it ahead in the water, slipping it beneath the still surface with hardly a ripple.

A ballerina could not walk more delicately. A bomb disposal expert more carefully. In the growing light pewter water reflects pewter sky and I watch how this flower-bird stalks: horror and beauty are at one in the dawn. The heron hunts with unswerving patience, its hoola hoop eyes highlighter yellow, circular as hope. Its head is smooth, domed like the cockpit glass of a jet fighter, its long beak white on top, blue on the bottom, tapered like an immense sewing needle: the heron, nature's idea of a spear throwing machine. As it moves I see its chest is a mottled gray and white, its thin legs black and fluted as burnt sticks. When it spreads its wings (six feet of blood vessel blue) I imagine a primordial light from the first days of time escaping into the world. When it folds them again it is like watching smoke being drawn back into its body.

Long knowledge and instinctive skill oil the heron's feathers. I sense an aura of sagely wisdom and old age – a priestliness. In the shadows, cattails float their seeds and I look but can not see the frog breaststroking to its very own end. Then without warning comes the lightning strike, too fast for my eye to follow and the heron lifts its sharp beak to the sky. It is like watching a man in a bar reach out and throw back a shot of strong whiskey – and in this moment all is revealed. I see how the heron fits the marsh, how the cattails fit their stems, how the clouds above fit the sky, and the mosses and trees in the forests fit their mountains, and the fish in their rivers fit the water and the bellies of bears. I see how the frog, pierced, fits the beak of the heron, and how the heron, swallowing, fits its hunger. I see how I, awake for the first time in years fit my skin and the skin of the morning; nothing without meaning, nothing without consequence, everything fitting everything wholly,

simply,

perfectly.

Wild Delicate Seconds: 29 Wildlife Encounters

Preț: 88^.36 lei

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Wild Delicate Seconds: 29 Wildlife Encounters

Preț: 88.36 lei

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Preț: 88^.36 lei