Customer Reviews

Observations of an Earth Mage

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This book, Observations of an Earth Mage, rested on my bedstand for weeks while I was distracted by the health care debate, wallowing in my mid-winter blues, and wishing for gin-and-tonic weather. What I should have been doing was reading this book.

Trudeau is the Barbara Cartland of nature writing. This collection of three dozen essays and poems about the natural places in the United States is a diary of Trudeau's rowdy love affair with the earth. As a reader, you feel the adoration and lust and sensuality of her lover, nature, in all her guises. You are alternately romanced, entranced, tumbled, and cuddled in this collection.

These beautiful essays are woven together of intimate emotions, honest descriptions, childhood experiences, and solid knowledge of natural history. They reveal a gently humorous, open, and vulnerable human experience this is in no way maudlin or syrupy. This is nature writing sturdy and substantive enough to warrant a second or third or fourth reading. By the way, Trudeau's nature photographs are visual icing on the literary cake of this luscious natural dessert.

Smoky is a wonderful writer. She has contemplated, studied, and written about nature most of her life--she knows what she is talking about. Her style is lyrical (whether it's poetry or prose) and direct, but inside it buzzes like a honeybee with spirituality. Too often, it seems to me, the modern view of nature is from the eyes of a macho athlete and adventurer--someone hanging from a precarious mountain cliff, shooting down a treacherous rapids, living with fierce grizzles, surviving in lonely isolation. But Smoky expresses the great mystery of nature in personal stories, poems, and photos about ground squirrels and marmots; anemones and sea slugs; Joshua trees and prickly pear cacti; childhood memories of family and, most important, her father. Observations of an Earth Mage is at once a gentle plea for conservation and respect, an invitation to take part, and a celebration of the breath of nature.

As a fan of Smoky Trudeau's novels, I expected a great deal of this new work--a collection of essays, poems and photographs. I was not disappointed. Trudeau's spirit of being one with nature comes through in this book, which is a loving tribute to the natural world around us. Her writing and photos encompass our land--the East, the Midwest, and the West--and the plant and animal life with which we share our small part of the universe. She sees beauty wherever she looks, and she brings that beauty home to the reader. Anyone who inhabits this planet should embrace and enjoy this delightful book.