Amazon.com: Field of Vision (9780877455516): Lisa Knopp: Books

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1996

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.

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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.

Editorial Reviews

From 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."

Review

“These are essays in the best and truest sense, assays, distillations, at once learned and personal. Lisa Knopp vividly demonstrates how encounters with the mundane details of nature—a mole's nose, the shell of a turtle, the tail of an opossum—can yield a richer and deeper life. She teaches us, by her own patient and inquiring example, how to see. This is the freshest and brightest collection of natural essays I have read in many years.”—Paul Gruchow, author of Grass Roots: The Universe of Home

“Lisa Knopp's wide-ranging studies in literature and natural history have helped her to achieve a sustained and vivid practice of attentiveness, Hers is an informed, and informative, sympathy with the lives of beavers and swallows, opossums and mayflies. Looking, reading, thinking, and looking some more, she finds her home in the earth.”—John Elder, author of Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature

More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Lisa Knopp Page

Lisa Knopp is the author of five collections of essays: Interior Places, The Nature of Home, Flight Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape, and Field of Vision, each of which explores the concepts of place, home, nature, and spirituality. What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte is forthcoming from the University of Missouri Press in April 2011. (http://press.umsystem.edu/product/What-the-River-Carries,2094.aspx)

Knopp's essays have appeared in many of the best publications, including Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Connecticut Review, Creative Nonfiction, Iowa Review, and Northwest Review. Six of her essays have received Notable Essay citations in the Best American Essays series.

Knopp was born and raised in Burlington, Iowa, and received her education at Burlington Community High School, Iowa Wesleyan College, Western Illinois University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has taught creative nonfiction in the MFA programs at Southern Illinois University and Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. Currently, she's an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, near her son and daughter.