This Incomperable Lande. A Book of American Nature Writing by Thomas J. Lyon

Abstract

270 Western American Literature The statements of the writers vary from carefully crafted mini-essays (David Lavender, Elizabeth Tallent) to personal histories to simple statements of belief (Stan Steiner: “The mountains, the land, the sun, the sky are the subject of everything I write. It’s that simple!”) Max Evans tells us, “We are the land, that’s all.” Writers commenting on such a first principle inevitably sound a little self-conscious. Jack Schaefer sounds grumpiest, Richard Bradford the most self-deprecatory. The best answers tell us more by allusion or anecdote than by explanation; not surprisingly, two of those strong voices come from Native American poets (Joy Harjo, Luci Tapahonso). My favorite spread in the book is Sabine Ulibarri. He has a wonderful face, and Farah’s portrait gives us his wrinkles and wisdom with clarity. His words about his land are just as strong: “There it is: a challenge, a threat, a hope, and a promise. . . .The land and the sky demand a response.” Farah’sbook, her response, is a worthwhile one that left me reassured that there always will be fine writers struggling with the challenge of Ulibarri’s land. La tierra demands it. That is “the hope and the promise.” STEPHEN TRIMBLE Salt Lake City, Utah This Incomperable Lande. A Book of American Nature Writing. Edited by Thomas J. Lyon. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. 495 pages, $29.95.) For more than a century Houghton Mifflin has been a publishing house devoted to American nature writing. The works of Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs and John Muir, for example, bore the Houghton Mifflin imprint, as have books by Wallace Stegner and Edwin Way Teale. It is most appropriate, then, for Houghton Mifflin now to publish an authoritative and scholarly yet attractive and informative overview of the genre. Thomas J. Lyon’s This Incomperable Lande gives the reader two impor­ tant ingredients. A thorough—nearly a hundred pages—and well-informed introduction traces the development of nature writing in America. Beginning in Puritan times, moving through the Enlightenment and on into the nine­ teenth century when Thoreau codified the form, then touching the breadth of contemporary variations, Lyon defines and describes exactly what this dis­ tinctly American kind of literature entails. “From the age of Bartram to the present,” he explains, “the main outlines of the genre—presentation of instruc­ tive natural history information, description of personal experience in nature, and commentary on man’srelationship with the wild world—have not changed an iota.” The second section of This Incomperable Lande demonstrates this thesis. A collection of representative essays in the field, it opens with a piece from the seventeenth century, then introduces a host ofother earlywriters—Bartram, Reviews 271 Alexander Wilson, John Godman, John Audubon, Thomas Nuttall. Excerpts by familiar authors are there, too—a month from Thoreau’s Journal, some Burroughs, and some Muir. Equally well-represented are our own contempor­ aries. To the editor’s credit, though, the selections are not those so often anthologized. Rather, they have been freshly chosen to demonstrate a vision at once scientific, personal, philosophic, and ethical. A few other ingredients of the book also command applause and respect. A well-conceived continuum charts a typology of the genre. Equally helpful is a chronology that not only dates major publications but notes symbolic things as well. Some examples include: 1807 “Cedar waxwings sell for twenty-five cents a dozen in Philadelphia meat markets.” 1834 “The last elk in the Adirondacks is killed.” 1914 “The last passenger pigeon dies in the Cincinnati Zoo.” 1984 “The National Academy of Sciences reports that approximately 53,500 synthetic chemicals are in use in the United States.” Finally, Houghton Mifflin should be praised for the handsomeness of the text itself and the quality of the attendant illustrations. The book fittingly exemplifies their commitment to the field. ANN RONALD University of Nevada Reno Coyote’s Canyon. Photographs by John Telford. Text by Terry Tempest Williams. (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1989. 96 pages, $15.95.) The austere beauty of southern Utah’s canyon country and the compell­ ing mythology of the vanished Anasazi dominate eight tales crafted from Terry Tempest Williams’s immersion in Hopi...