Field of Vision
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
In this contemplative collection of essays, Lisa Knopp moves out from the prairies of Nebraska and Iowa to encompass a fully developed vision of light, memory, change, separateness, time, symbols, responsibility, and unity. Knopp charts a stimulating course among the individual, community, and culture that removes the boundaries between self and other, allowing one to become fully present in the world. Her keen vision sees beyond the ordinary to illuminate the mysteries and meanings of our personal and natural worlds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her first collection of nature essays, Knopp offers 16 pieces filled with the evidence not only of books but also of the eyes, ears, nose and taste buds to give a multidimensional view of nature. In nature, Knopp also gains new understanding into herself and her struggles with divorce, motherhood and her precarious economic life as a writer and a teacher. The Mississippi River, pheasants, the prairie edge, sumac shrubs, crickets, moles, turtle shells, the stars, opossums, bald eagles, beavers, cottonwood trees and mayflies have all been stalked and observed. Like Loren Eiseley, Knopp is a synthetic thinker who segues smoothly from turtle shells to human bones to memories in her essay "Hard Remains." Like John Burroughs, she exposes nature fakes--those literary naturalists who refuse to see nature in itself, but see only nature in their own minds. Rather than anthropomorphize nature, Knopp naturalizes herself and, in visions worthy of Annie Dillard, can merge with the objects of her perception: "And at that moment of new vision, it was not the mayfly but I who ascended toward regions unseen, breaking the surface film, my many-lensed eyes shocked by a light suddenly direct and steady and hot." Knopp, like Eiseley, Burroughs, and Dillard, addresses the central question of American nature writing: how to "see herself in the natural world but also see the natural world of herself."
