Bird Songs of the Mesozoic: A Day Hiker's Guide to the Nearby Wild (The World As Home) [Paperback]

David Brendan Hopes (Author)

Book Description

Series: The World As Home | Publication Date: February 15, 2005

As Balzac famously said of cities, “to walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.” For David Brendan Hopes, day hikes provide the perfect occasion for both refuge and contemplation. Encounters with wild animals, rare plants, or simply the perfect moment of weather and view are opportunities to reflect on the sublime synchronicity of human and natural life. The ferns of early spring transport him through time, to wonder whether dinosaurs had song. The emergence of cicadas calls to mind men and women “gorgeous in impractical ways.” A glorious display — one of “exuberant defiance” — of late fall roses suggests that plants might have moods. Touching on themes as diverse as hunting, deep ecology, wicca, and sci-fi literature, Hopes’ hikes and thoughts are part of a sifting of experience that unites the everyday world with a larger personal and eternal story.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Poet, professor, and author Hopes turns his gaze toward the landscape of Asheville, North Carolina, and points farther afield. Knowledgeable, gifted with curiosity and a superb talent, the author writes "about the portion of nature I see around me, the dragonflies that buzz into my studio, the opossum cornered in the garage, the cats asleep on the desk." Hopes knows how to find the magical in the quotidian: he sings to listless rhinoceroses at the Mississippi zoo and catches the fringes of hurricane Ivan in the middle of a bank parking lot. On another day, a routine hike leads to the exhilaration of running behind a catamount up a dark mountain. Throughout, he provides history and sublime detail (thoughts about a resident groundhog outside the author's studio lead to musings on the solstice, national identity, and the grief of mammals). One can open any page and find a gem: "Rolling thunder before dawn; the moon behind the bunched clouds is trembling." This collection of wondrous and near-perfect essays should bring Hopes a wider audience. Rebecca Maksel
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"...his close investigations of oft-overlooked phenomena restores magic to that which is often maligned as merely mundane." -- Bellingham Weekly

"Blending in just the right amount of wit, fact and personal and cultural reflection, Bird Songs. . . is full of suprises." -- Body & Soul Magazine, May 2005

"Hopes knows how to find the magical in the quotidian. . . . Open any page and find a gem." —Rebecca Maksel -- Booklist, February 1, 2005

"Hopes' essays are literate, but not stuffy." -- Akron Beacon Journal, August 1, 2005

"It’s (a) fantastic, myopic world that Hopes brings to the reader. Everyday sights and sounds are transformed into poetry." -- Mountain Xpress, April 20, 2005

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions (February 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571312773
• ISBN-13: 978-1571312778
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,644,350 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars engaging writing on nearness of nature in everyday life, April 30, 2005

By 

Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bird Songs of the Mesozoic: A Day Hiker's Guide to the Nearby Wild (The World As Home) (Paperback)

Besides professor of literature at the U. of North Carolina-Asheville, author Hope is also a painter, actor, poet, and theater director. He uses his senses, skills, and experiences in all of these in writings on nature. He doesn't go looking for nature by trekking into the wilderness or vacationing to exotic places, for instance. Rather he takes nature where he finds it in the rounds and occasional excursions of his ordinary life. As he has found, "nature finds us where we are." In addition to the fetching essays, Hopes wants to impart the lesson that nature is always at hand in some way; and can, and should be, recognized and appreciated on this basis accessible to anyone at any time.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wild At Heart, February 9, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bird Songs of the Mesozoic: A Day Hiker's Guide to the Nearby Wild (The World As Home) (Paperback)

Hopes is an engaging writer who's not afraid to look for the beauties of nature even in the most suburban of spaces. He advises us not to wait till we have time to make that long planned hike into the Swiss Alps or Andes, turn around and look in your own backyard. As he grows older, he remembers a time when he used to cut classes in college solely in order to exercise a new pair of hiking boots, but now he realizes with a start that all of last year he took only one other hike besides the present one. And you'll chuckle as he finds the body of an animal savaged by a catamount and to get over the shock he goes for the flavored vodka (that he brought along with him "to ward off the cold," yeah right). A professor by day and a poet by night, Hopes is also rather theatrical and Southern, and folks who enjoyed the grim Guignol of something like MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL should thrive on this one.

One evening he gives into impulse and he decides to stay overnight in an unlikely destination, the mountain town of Princeton, West Virginia. We see this bustling little town through his eyes, share his surprise at the abundance and the optimism of a place he thought might be frightful. He sees churchgoers ushering each other into services with a gentle hand pressed into the small of the other's back, and he reflects that among his circle, such a gesture would be verboten, bound to be misconstrued in the edgy world of college life and its attendant harassment protocols. How long it has been since he's felt a gentle hand in the small of his back! A human gesture that comes with a certain prim grace.

At night, sipping his vodka, the moon grows full and Hopes relaxes into the miracle of modern night. I love his descriptions of light and color, and the particular stillness of time. "[The moon] makes the hill the color of distant fire, then of linen and snow. Soon the dark is not dark at all, not black, but sivery cobalt, a line of shadow thrown behind every tree, every blade of grass." Description by accretion, by ringing the changes in the silvery hillside. "The million, million stars make still points on the face of the stream until broken by the body of a trout. Some really are red, some gold, one almost green among the blue-white diamonds." I couldn't figure out if he meant the trout or the stars by that point. And to tell you the truth I didn't care. It's an extraordinary synaesthesia of abandonment.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Soft Natural History, December 31, 2005

By 

Ming the Merciless (Metro NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bird Songs of the Mesozoic: A Day Hiker's Guide to the Nearby Wild (The World As Home) (Paperback)

Well-written, but the author's grasp of "real nature" seemed rather slight and superficial. Clearly more literary than natural-historical. On the other hand, the doctored Polaroids that illustrate the book--very clever!