Customer Reviews

A Haunting Reverence: Meditations on a Northern Land (Univ of Minnesota PR)

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I found this book by accident. I liked the title and I love nature writing. But this isn't nature writing like anything I have ever read. This is some of the most beautiful poetry and storytelling I have ever read. It is the most spiritual nature writing I have ever read. This book took me to a place like prayer. Kent Nerburn is a genius.

When I picked-up this book from our best-reader Friend, who gave us a chapter from SIMPLE TRUTHS, I expected it to be equally as simply written! Not simple in the ways of writing or organized! Since his Prologue, entitled "A CANTICLE OF ECHOES, Kent grasped my attention with his first quote from a - Pueblo saying, "We do not own the land. We belong to it. And by our sweat & breath shall she know us, and welcome us upon our return."

Kent begins: "We are children on this land a shadow on the still life of time.." Employing words as far more than commentary to his Pueblo saying. He measures words economically descibing past generations "whose arrival is scribed upon the line of history...(yet not adrift) on winds of story, or float upon the shrouds of myth!" I read in his brevity, layers of past, present & future!

From earlier pages he takes us back to BURIAL, "My home is over there. Now I remember it." - A Tewa song..."I am standing before a northern lake on a windswept point of land as a young Indian boy is lowered into the earth by his friends and family.

"It is a strange and lonely funeral-- they all are in their own way...In the Indians who made their home here-- like my young departed friend-- Something lives that invests this harsh land with spiritual values."

Kent never misses chances to relate the present back to the past history of his Northern Lands, even in his continued quoting of Indian Tribes: As in NATVITY: "What is life?...It is the breath of the buffalo in the winter time..." A Blackfeet death oration. After a gripping mysterious picture of a giant buffalo, Kent is at home with his short Essays based on, BLUE, JANUARY, URN, COPSE, GOOD FRIDAY, OFFERING, WIND. Poignant quotations are adopted from Sioux, Papago, Iroquois, Delaware & Crow Tribes. There are parallels between his essays based on tribal quotes and Haunting Reverence of Christian worship in all Nerburn's books... newly birthed from his majors of Religion and Art!

He refers to religion in MEMORY of TREES, "I see men but they look like trees, walking." Again in Solitudes: "The holy silence is God's voice." Golden treasures wait being discovered! Retired Chaplain Fred W Hood "Barbara377" (Fayetteville, GA United States)

I loved this book; it is about nature, spirituality and seeing things in a new way. The author helps one to see and feel what he is.....I have used many of his books as gifts...they are a forever treasure.

I had a hard time finding this and so glad I finally did. Its fantastic, simply beautiful. Nerburn is in a league all his own. I keep his books by my bedside.