"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator, widely admired for work that bridges lyric poetry, meditation, ecology, and philosophy. She’s also known as a lucid critic of poetry and has written influential essays on how poems work and why they matter. Ten Windows: How...
Annie Dillard is an American writer best known for her lyrical and philosophical essays about nature, attention, and spiritual life. Her most famous book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. It's a work of made up of connected essays and observations...
Francis Ponge, a French poet mostly concentrated on everyday objects, wrote Le Parti pris des choses in seclusion during the German occupation of France, and published it in 1942. The title is usually translated into English as Taking the Side of Things (or The Nature...
Every text this last few days has, in one way or another, been circling around the same question: what's a path and what makes a path? Not a road already drawn and simply walked afterward, but a path in the sense that seems to keep...
Antonio Machado was a major Spanish poet and playwright, associated with the Generation of ’98, a group of writers who reflected on Spain’s identity and crisis at the turn of the 20th century. He was born in Seville in 1875 and died in 1939 in...
Kathleen Jamie is a Scottish poet and essayist, born in 1962, known for her prose and poetry about landscape, place, and everyday life. Findings is her essay collection of personal reflections, first published in 2005, and it moves through nature and cities, archaeology, hospitals, family...
A un certo punto ci sarà una battuta, in questo fumetto, e riderete. Sappiate che è l'unica. Com'è giusto che sia. Se devo paragonare quest'opera a qualcosa, il confronto più azzeccato è probabilmente lo spettacolo che Marco Paolini trasse dal Sergente nella neve di Rigoni Stern:...
Derek Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and painter, and one of the major voices of Caribbean literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, and his work often explores Caribbean history, identity, colonial inheritance, and the meeting of European and African...
I had a genuine “oh shit” moment when I read the author’s preface saying this was darker than “Winter Harvest” because – and I absolutely ADORED “Winter Harvest” – that was pitch-black dark. I thought “we’re all going to die”. This maybe has something to do...
Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, an epic work set in a fictional town called Desperance, opens before there are any people in it at all: an ancestral serpent, "a creature larger than storm clouds," descends from the stars and drags itself across the wet clay of the...
