Product Description: Picking Up the Flute sets to music a former professor’s musings on retirement, marriage, literature, and the natural world. From his home in historic Bristol, Vermont to Ireland’s Connemara coast, travel through John Elder’s exquisite topography and relish his explorations of nature, poetry, and geology...read more

Product Description: So Little Time is a revolving door of political activism, spirituality, nature, and humanity. It is a call to action, where urgency meets poetry in no uncertain terms, and asks, What hour are we in? Edited by poet, Irish and U. S...read more

Product Description: An examination of New England's diverse landscapes, and our varying perceptions of them, across two centuries of settlement, work, and recreation.A Landscape History of New England takes a view of New England's landscapes that goes beyond picture postcard-ready vistas of white-steepled churches, open pastures, and tree-covered mountains...read more

"Set aside your Bella Tuscanys and Year in Provences for a different kind of travel book. Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa puts a walking stick in your hand and Marsh’s Man and Nature in your knapsack, exploring how Italians have managed their natural and cultural heritage in ways that sustain both. John Elder’s poetic meditations on land and life demonstrate that only by searching beyond our familiar boundaries can we discover better ways of living back at home."―Marcus Hall, author of Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration "This collaboration―between George Perkins Marsh and John Elder, between Vermont and Italy, between maple and olive―is one of the smartest, soundest, deepest books about the relationship between people and nature that I’ve ever read. It will be a classic."―Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature"Elder’s impassioned pilgrimage shows us how to delight in messy wilderness, to secure a curative habitation of the world, and, with Marsh, to lend ecological nous to our gravest task: knowing ourselves and respecting one another. Let the maple seeds and olive stones of Elder’s visionary harvest restore to us a reflective and redemptory future."―from the foreword by David LowenthalThe pivotal figure in Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa is the nineteenth-century diplomat and writer George Perkins Marsh, generally regarded as America’s first environmentalist. Like Elder, Marsh was a Vermonter, and his diplomatic career took him for some years to Italy, where, witnessing the ecological devastation wrought upon the landscape by runaway deforestation and the plundering of other natural resources, he was moved to produce his famous manifesto, Man and Nature. Marsh drew parallels between the despoiled Italian environment and his home landscape of Vermont, warning that the latter was vulnerable to ecological woes of a similar magnitude if not carefully maintained and protected. In short, his was a prescient voice for stewardship. Elder follows in Marsh’s footsteps along a trajectory running from Vermont to Italy, and at length fetches up at the managed forest of Vallombrosa. Punctuated throughout with learned and genial considerations of the poetry of Wordsworth, Basho, Dante, and Frost, Elder’s narrative takes up issues of sustainability as practiced locally, reports on family doings, and returns finally―as did Marsh’s―to Vermont, where he measures traditional stewardship values against more aggressive conservation-oriented measures such as the expansion of wilderness areas. John Elder, Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, is the author of Reading the Mountains of Home and The Frog Run.Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

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Presents premier nature writing by a mixed group of established and newer writers, among them Melville, William Bertram, John Muir, W. H. Hudson, Dorothy Wordsworth, E. B. White, and Barry Lopez

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Presents a definitive compilation of masterpieces of prose nature writing in a new edition containing more than fifty new selections by such authors as Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, David Quammen, Gary Snyder, and other established, recently discovered, or new authors. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The North Woods tradition of making maple syrup serves as an illuminating backdrop for John Elder’s reflections on nature, literature, playfulness, and fatherhood, as he builds a sugaring house with his sons.

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Using Robert Frost's poem 'Directive' as a guide, the author reflects on nature as he experienced it on a series of hikes in Vermont's Green Mountains

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A landmark work in the burgeoning field of literary ecology, Imagining the Earth explores the ways in which our attitudes toward nature are mirrored in and influenced by poetry. In the work of some of our most widely read poets, says John Elder, one can discern a resurgent vision of humanity in harmony with the rest of the natural order.To show us the power of poetry to identify, interpret, and celebrate a wide range of issues related to nature and our place in it, Elder uses numerous examples of works by Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, A. R. Ammons, Denise Levertov, and William Everson. Elder places these poets within a cultural tradition flowing from William Wordsworth through Alfred North Whitehead, T. S. Eliot, and Robinson Jeffers, and uses their poems to illuminate the relationships between culture and wilderness, imagination and landscape, and science and poetry. Elder's commentaries are interlinked with two remarkable essays in which he describes his ow

A selection of stories derived from areas whose indigenous surroundings have shaped many generations of cultures includes figures from mythology, folklore, legend, and modern day, such as North America's Br'er Rabbit and Africa's Anansi the Spider.

An American professor recounts the year that he and his family lived in Kyoto, Japan, discussing his experiences with an elementary school, a calligraphy class, a Go club, and Noh acting