TRANSPARENT MOUNTAIN
ecopoetry from the Great Smokies
Loss Pequeño Glazier
San Francisco: Night Horn Books, 2022. Paperback – $22.00 – 112 pages. ISBN: 978-0-941842-09-9
Orders: City Lights Books NC | Malaprop's Bookstore Asheville
About the Poems
Transparent Mountain: Ecopoetry from the Great Smokies weaves strands of the history, ecology, and poetic spirit of the Southern Appalachians. Impressive as the mountains are, few people realize that the splendor of the Smokies has transcended near-total devastation in the Twentieth century. Transparent Mountain explores the necessity of wilderness to life on earth. Awareness of our connection to the interdependent worlds of living things is needed if we are to address global climate concerns and to respect the web of natural wonders that sustains us on this planet. Through narrative, histories, flights of naturalist empathy, reverence for early inhabitants, and often unrestrained poetic excesses, these shaped, tonally varied, and eco-driven poems evoke how the magic of old growth spirit can still be witnessed in moments of recollection.
Praise for Transparent Mountain
As the name Han Shan is associated with Cold Mountain, Loss Pequeño Glazier will be bound up with the transparent Smokies. – John Shoptaw (Times Beach, “Why Ecopoetry”)
Transparent Mountain is a magnum opus of eco-poetry, an ecstatic vision of a living, breathing earth. Chock full of marvelous sense data met with a calm disposition of deep spiritual understanding, Loss Pequeño Glazier’s perspective from a cabin in the Smoky Mountains embraces earth and sky, mountain and river, sea and stone, mind and matter, Basho and Muir, self and non-self. – Kit Robinson (Quarantina)
Immersion in this river of words is a baptism into nature, carrying the reader away into worlds, universes, and mini-verses where oceans are mountains, mountains are whales, whales are clouds, and nothing is ever motionless because all are atoms and atoms are energy and energy is all. – Chris Bolgiano (The Appalachian Forest)
A sutra of words flowing through a sylvan watershed, one line reflecting the Cosmos, the next slowing for an eddy of human flotsam, pausing for an Archimedean commentary, then pressing on humming hosannas for the spindrift sea. – Red Pine (Zen Roots: The First Thousand Years)
Loss Pequeño Glazier's new epic poem is an incredible statement on the power of observation, and attention to place. Much in the spirit of William Bartram, it is full of both love and lamentation for these southern mountains and for all of life on this amazing planet. – Brent Martin, Executive Director, Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy (George Masa’s Wild Vision)
from Transparent Mountain
It is no different for the forest. Even as it
dwindles, it draws presence from when half
the earth’s landmass was dense, impenetrable
woods. Not the epoch
of the Pleistocene America of mastodons and
woolly mammoths at the arrival of peoples
migrating from slowly warming Beringia
15,000 years ago. Nor as when
encroachment of Europeans when it reached
fully from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.
(They saw trees as masts, Europe
then deforested, riven, mown.)
It is not one, but all these things. Its ancient
energy, anchored in rock, soil. Terra time
not human time. Cascading slope, ropy
undulations of old-growth roots,
a thousand intelligences in living form.
Our legacy left in dogwood bracts.
About Loss Pequeño Glazier
Loss Pequeño Glazier (http://www.lpglazier.com) is a multilingual woodland poet who has spent years writing, teaching, and roving heart-spirit landscapes in Berkeley, Paris, India, Mexico, Cuba, Buffalo, and the Blue Ridge/Southern Appalachians. Works include Luna Lunera: Poems al-Andalus, Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm, and Digital Poetics: the Making of E-Poetries. Glazier lives and writes in the vitalizing bio-diversity of the Smoky Mountains.
Orders: City Lights Books NC
| Malaprop's Bookstore Asheville