On Nature’s Terms: Contemporary Voices ed. by Thomas J. Lyon, Peter Stine (review)

150 Western American Literature evolved a community myth; lacking a Willa Cather or a William Faulkner to forge its past into enduring meaning, Nevada has only projected a series of grand illusions. -Chef ERYLL BURGESS GLOTFELTY University ofNevada, Reno -fjn Nature’ s Terms: Contemporary Voices. Edited by Thomas J. Lyon and Peter Stine. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992. 212 pages, $35.00/ $14.95.) “Why is so much recent American fiction so barren?” asked Scott Russell Sanders in a 1987 essay called “Speaking a Word for Nature” (Michigan Quarterly Review). “That a deep awareness of nature has been largely excluded from ‘mainstream’ fiction,” he concluded, “is a measure of the narrowing and trivialization of that fashionable current.” What’s worse, this literary phenom ­ enon is “a measure of a shared blindness in the culture at large.” Fiction writers have become increasingly attuned to the environment in the past six years, but as this new anthology demonstrates, our “contemporary voices”for nature have spoken most powerfully in the genre of nonfiction. In their deep attentiveness to birds and bears, to trees, to place, to the present moment, to the passing of seasons, and to the consequences of human action and inaction, the twenty essays in this collection support Thomas J. Lyon’s observation that the nature essay originates in the author’s private fluctuations of consciousness, then reaches its reader by way of written stories. Thirteen of these essays appeared in Lyon’s special issue of the journal Witness devoted to “New Nature Writing” (Winter 1989). But these have been supplemented with seven additional selections, and Lyon has revised his intro­ duction, now called “Out from under the Dome,” to include several new paragraphs criticizing the myth of growth that has afflicted this continent for the past five centuries. As a result of this desire to overcome nature, Lyon claims, our literature has become internalized, has come to emphasize the indoors. And yet, he writes, “we crave to come out from under the dome and have vivid seeing and experience. Nature writing, then, is a form of story confirming that we are still alive, still capable, and that fulfillment, after our flailing around, might be in something as radically simple as a blue-sky day.” The word “dom e”suggests both our own minds and the shelters we construct to insulate ourselves from weather, animals, and landscapes—from reality. The essays in this collection allow no such insulation, no such isolation; they alter­ nately admonish and celebrate, luring readers toward renewed contact with the world. The authors of the pieces in the original Witness issue—Rick Bass, Charles Bowden, Jean Craighead George, John Hay, Edward Hoagland, William Reviews 151 Kittredge, Barry Lopez, Sherman Paul, Gary Snyder, John Tallmadge, Stephen Trimble, Jack Turner, and Terry Tempest Williams—include some of the most prolific and important contemporary American nature writers. But two particu­ larly challenging and evocative essays in the journal (reprinted in the book), T urner’s “The Abstract Wild” and Tallmadge’s “Meeting the Tree of Life,” are by writersjust beginning to receive national attention. Lyon and Peter Stine, the editor of Witnessand co-editor of this anthology, have nicely extended the scope of the journal issue by adding the work of Marcia Bonta, Scott Thybony, Brenda Peterson, Gary Nabhan, and Dan Flores. This anthology provides a splendid response to Sanders’s complaint about the barrenness and blindness of recent fiction, the essayists’ intense prose giving us new eyes with which to view the relationships between humanity and nonhuman nature, men and women, different cultures, and even various academic disciplines. (.-Sef^FT SLOVIC Southwest Texas State University tJxrr^Tjove of the World: Essays on Nature Writers. By Sherman Paul. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. 264 pages, $32.95/$14.95.) The literature of nature continues to defy our attempts to categorize it neatly. Perhaps this is why Sherman Paul’s informal, leisurely, evocative reflec­ tions on nature writers seem so admirably suited to the material. Ruminating with a wide range of writers—Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Barry Lopez, Aldo Leopold, Henry Beston, Richard Nelson and Loren Eiseley—Paul allows their work to emerge on its own terms...