Horse Press Research Articles

Book review: Mathieu, Jon: Mount Sacred. A short global history of holy mountains since 1500

Mathieu, Jon: Mount Sacred. A short global history of holy mountains since 1500. 155 pp. 11 figs. The White Horse Press. Winwick 2023. ISBN 978-1-912186-716, 30 £. eISBN 978-1-912186-72-3, OA ebook.Mathieu, Jon: Mount Sacred. Eine kurze Globalgeschichte der heiligen Berge seit 1500. 192 pp. 11 figs. Böhlau. Wien 2023. ISBN: 978-3-205-21702-2, eISBN: 978-3-205-21703-9, 35 €.
 The topic of sacred mountains has been fascinating for mountain researchers that had access to varied peaks on different continents and opened up comparative perspectives. Edwin Bernbaum’s (1990) famous book on Sacred mountains of the world was published a generation ago at the same time when Karl Gratzl (1990) edited his book on Die heiligsten Berge der Welt. It was a time when the human sphere of mountain regions attracted more attention by anthropologists, archaeologists and geographers. Embedded in a less prophane approach their descriptive books hinted towards more rigorous studies on indigenous practices and rituals, emphasized the historical rootedness of mountain communities and led to changing appreciations over time on the path to highlighting mountain exceptionalism and its exalted representation of pristine environments.The recent publication of Jon Mathieu’s Mount Sacred is a welcome reflection about how mountains became sacred objects and sanctified entities covering a period of half a millennium. The author, himself an authority on European Alpine history, has been fascinated by global mountain studies earlier on in his seminal work on the ‘third dimension’ (Mathieu 2011). This as well as the present book were simultaneously published in German and English.It is fascinating to read how sacred mountains have been created and imagined, how belief systems and scientific approaches shaped the perception of mountain peaks. The opening two chapters are devoted to an enquiry that is inspired by seminal works on Eurasian studies with a focus on place and position of mountains in structuring human environments, environmental control and scientific approaches. Eight chapters are devoted to selected mountains, among which we find at the beginning Mount Kailash and at the end Uluru. The former has probably gained the highest attention among Western readers and has been further promoted since being popularised as the ‘holiest mountain’ (Tichy 1937) suggesting a hierarchy of sacredness. In contrast, Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock in Australia, has been rather neglected in the above-mentioned books, probably because the mountain towers only 350 metres above the surrounding plains. Uluru has gained in popular appreciation and became a symbol in the recently debated treaty for Indigenous Australians.The two cases from China and Korea – Tai Shan and Paektusan/Changbaishan – have been canonized in their respective political contexts. Beginning with ritual importance and a deep historical rootedness they have been instrumentalized for less religious purposes and fixed on the political maps of China and North Korea. Presenting cases from the Christian realm in the European Alps seemed to be more challenging as there were pilgrimage places in villages and valleys, rather than a tradition of attributed sacredness and mountain worship on Alpine peaks and passes. Jon Mathieu entertains the reader with a number of anecdotes and historical turns in placing crosses there and in a subsequent chapter on erecting crosses in Italy and neighbouring countries on places in order to celebrate Catholic Christians’ persistence at the beginning of the 20th century. Here a comparison with the wider Himalayan arc and its manifold iconography and materiality on passes, springs and rivers would have been interesting because of its pilgrimage practices, plentiful stocks and great variety of expression and ritual veneration. The chapter devoted to North America puts the Black Hills where Black Elk and Lakota Sioux used to pray to their ‘six grandfathers’ (Tunkasila Sakpe Paha) into the centre of attention; it is the same place where the conflict about Mount Rushmore with the rock sculptures of four American presidents emerged. Competition about sacred places occurs as well where adventure sports and rock climbing take place in spiritually laden or only respected places and peaks. This applies for North American national parks obviously more than for the East African volcanoes; the latter having become attractive tourism destinations with the Kilimanjaro and victims of myth creation. Marketing of mountains has often contributed to generating legends and stories about alleged sacredness and spiritual capacities of mountains. In this context many more prominent case studies and mountain regions would come to our mind that are not covered or mentioned in this book. Jon Mathieu made his selection in order to investigate the underlying processes of creating Mount Sacred.Jon Mathieu’s approach to unearth the roots of the sacredness of some mountains and telling us revealing stories about influential actors and changing factors over time has resulted in an entertaining and enlightening text that broadens the horizon of mountain veneration. His book is highly recommended to interested members, promotors and curious visitors of mountain communities.

Dream Bridge: Selected Poems by Oleh Lysheha

Reviewed by: Dream Bridge: Selected Poems by Oleh Lysheha Ostap Kin OLEH LYSHEHA Dream Bridge: Selected Poems Trans. Virlana Tkacz & Wanda Phipps. Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2022. 160 pages. IN NOVEMBER 2013 I met Oleh Lysheha for the first and last time. During that meeting, we chatted about the United States (where Lysheha spent a whole year on a Fulbright scholarship), the underground Lviv scene of the 1970s and '80s, the Ukrainian modernist poets of the early twentieth century, and American writers of the nineteenth century. At some point, Lysheha shared this legend (or myth) that captivates my attention still. In 1939, when the Soviets entered Lviv, they authorized the establishment of a union of writers so that Ukrainian- and Polishand Yiddish-language writers populating the city could coexist on some kind of official level. Thus, newspapers and journals were established, and the publishing industry also began to function in Lviv, printing all kinds of books. Legend has it that one day Bruno Schulz, a Polish-Jewish writer from Drohobych, appeared in the office of Petro Kozlaniuk, a writer affiliated with the newly created union of writers. Schulz gave him a manuscript of a short story he allegedly wrote in Ukrainian. After spending some time on the work, Kozlaniuk's verdict was adverse: this story won't be published. A myth, a legend, an exaggeration, this lore of Schulz's unknown short story in Ukrainian is still captivating. (Upon reflection, this might have been a reworked story of Schulz trying to pitch his original Polish-language work to a newly established venue, interested in works embodying social realism as its true virtue.) Oleh Lyshesha, born in 1949, had succeeded, without carrying too much or giving it much of a try, in securing a special place in the literary canon of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Ukrainian literature. In addition to being a genuine poet, he was also an outstanding prose writer and essayist, and hopefully, one day, his prose, too, will see the light of day in English translation. His poems are arresting; his technique is demanding, changeable, and progressing; his story as a writer is captivating; and his behavior is extravagant as befits a poet—all in all, features that a great poet might possess. Lysheha's formative and decisive years took place in the city of Lviv, once a multicultural and multilingual crossroads, and overlapped with the Soviet Union's stagnation period, with little perspective and a dull atmosphere of total hopelessness. But there was a cohort of people eager to form a clandestine circle that intellectually and culturally opposed the boredom of daily routine and led nonconformist lives. When Lysheha was a senior at a local university, studying the English language and literature, shortly before graduation he was expelled for participating in an unofficial literary journal, Skrynia (The Chest). Lysheha had to start a life from scratch. The fact of being expelled from the university closed the doors to any official establishments, which the poet didn't quite seek anyway. Nevertheless, that expulsion offered him priceless intellectual freedom to create and share the work he cultivated until the end of his life. For most of the Soviet era, his work was thoroughly appreciated, although clandestinely, by a highly appreciative and selective circle of readers and colleagues. It wasn't until before the collapse of the Soviet Union that his first collection, Zyma v Tysmenytsi (Winter in Tysmenytsia), came out when he was forty. It is represented in this collection by just a few poems, including the blockbuster poem "Song 212": "There are so many superstars, overgrown with weeds.. / Somewhere Tom Jones // Is still singing about that green-green grass.. // On such a night under the moon among the trees // cinnamon mushrooms // practice choreography." [End Page 74] The constellation of writers that formed Lysheha as an author and illuminated his path is quite unusual for a poet who lived in those geographical coordinates at that time. His poetry has something of a modernist feel, like that of Ezra Pound (whom he rendered into Ukrainian); then, on a different level, there is a mixed team of heavyweights from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Henry David Thoreau, Robert...

Lost Horse Press: An Interview with Christine Lysnewycz Holbert

Lost Horse Press: An Interview with Christine Lysnewycz Holbert

Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow: Selected Poems. By Natalka Bilotserkivets. The Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series, Vol. 8, Trans. Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Sandpoint, Idaho: Lost Horse Press, 2021. 201 pp. Notes. Bibliography. $24.00, paper.

Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow: Selected Poems. By Natalka Bilotserkivets. The Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series, Vol. 8, Trans. Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Sandpoint, Idaho: Lost Horse Press, 2021. 201 pp. Notes. Bibliography. $24.00, paper.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Daniel Simon a dark angel flies with a shofar playing his trumpet in flight – Boris Khersonsky Click for larger view View full resolution HOW IS IT possible to think about art during a time of war? Years before the Russian military began the full-scale destruction of the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kyiv, and many others in February 2022, writers and artists had been raising their voices in defense of freedom and peace. And while Vladimir Putin's ethnonationalist, irredentist campaign to annex Ukraine continues to kill thousands of people, wreak untold destruction, and send millions of refugees into exile, the current "Muses" issue of WLT makes the case for a Republic of Arts and Letters that transcends geopolitical conflicts and promotes a shared sense of humanity through cultural ties. Many of the cultural linkages present in this issue go as far back as Odessa in the late nineteenth century, where the Russian painters Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1914) both attended the Grekov Odessa art school. Pasternak's painting of his famous son, Boris beside the Baltic at Mereküla (1910), appears alongside a letter that Boris wrote to a young University of Oklahoma student soon after Pasternak had been awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, which, under pressure from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and the Union of Soviet Writers, he declined to accept (page 20). Romanian artist and writer Constantin Severin's poem dedicated to Kandinsky appears alongside the latter's Composition #218 (Two Ovals) (1919). In a note introducing his poem, Severin writes: "Kandinsky inspired me as a symbol of interferences and fusion between music and art, soul and spirit, human and angel, dark history and bright culture" (page 42). A dark gulf looms between history and culture in the present moment, however. A further cultural connection presents itself in the interview with Russian Jewish émigré writer Yelena Lembersky (page 22). Her grandfather, Felix Lembersky (1913–1970), created a series of paintings between 1944 and '52 depicting the murder of more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews at Babyn Yar in September 1941, "the largest single mass killing by the German army during its campaign against the Soviet Union" (Wolfram Wette). These paintings are the earliest representations of the massacre and among the earliest artistic images of the Holocaust. "Under the Stalinist regime," Lembersky's daughter Galina writes, "my father was offered fame, wealth, position, and endless opportunities to paint [and] exhibit his work," but instead "he refused the grand offer and chose instead poverty, persecution, and deprivation" (lembersky.org). For her part, Galina stood guard on the roof of the Academy of Arts during the Nazi siege of Leningrad (1941–44), armed with a bucket of sand. Back in Kyiv, over the course of the war, more than 100,000 victims of Nazi mass murder died at Babyn Yar during the occupation. On March 1, 2022, when Russian airstrikes killed at least five people at the site of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the attack on Twitter, writing: "What is the point of saying 'never again' for eighty years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?" In their just-released verse collection The Country Where Everyone's Name Is Fear, by Odessan writers Lyudmyla and Boris Khersonsky (Lost Horse Press), war pervades the poems like an "angel of destruction" hovering over a landscape where a "black sun of melancholy shines like a shrapnel hole." As editors Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky note in their introduction, both poets have switched from Russian to Ukrainian in their recent work, in solidarity with other Ukrainian writers and artists. "Against the backdrop of silent muses heavy gunfire thunders louder," Boris writes in one poem, "and then there's a shank in your ribcage or gunshots at pointblank." In another poem, he imagines an era of "postwar executions" in which "the only justice is the bullet and the rope." Will writers and artists look away while such justice is rendered? Art must bear witness in a time of war as well as its aftermath. And even when they fall...

Charles-François Mathis and Émilie-Anne Pepy, Greening the City: Nature in French Towns from the 17th Century. Winwick: White Horse Press. 2020. 340pp. 54 figures. £75.00 hbk.

Charles-François Mathis and Émilie-Anne Pepy, Greening the City: Nature in French Towns from the 17th Century. Winwick: White Horse Press. 2020. 340pp. 54 figures. £75.00 hbk.

Moon , David Breyfogle , Nicholas B. Bekasova , Alexandra Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History (review)

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 782 in 1945, Tito aggressively pressed his ‘imperial’ ambitions: by advocating the incorporation of Trieste and later with his support to the Communists in the Greek Civil War (1946–49). What is problematic here is that the authors’ claims about Tito’s intent to export revolution to other parts of Europe are not new. When in September 1947 Stalin summoned the first meeting of the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform), and subsequently moved its headquarters to Yugoslavia, Tito appeared to emerge as the Comintern’s de facto leader. Tito may have erroneously assumed that Stalin supported the Yugoslav leadership’s commitment to a revolutionary offensive in Greece, Italy and elsewhere. Ivo Banac (1988) and Geoffrey Swain (1992), among others, have demonstrated that it was Tito’s efforts to support the Greek Communists and his decision, in January 1948, to station troops in Albania (at that time, a satellite of Communist Yugoslavia) which led to the Tito-Stalin split of 1948. Tito’s revolutionary hubris and ‘imperial’ ambitions ultimately clashed with Stalin’s restrained approach, which was concerned above all with avoiding a military conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western allies. Despite its limitations, Tito’s Secret Empire is often insightful, contains interesting background information about Tito’s relationship with the members of his inner circle, and mostly makes for compelling reading. Institute of European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies Mark Biondich Carleton University Moon, David; Breyfogle, Nicholas B. and Bekasova, Alexandra (eds). Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History. The White Horse Press, Winwick, 2021. xxi + 343 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £70.00: $95.00: €75.00. Place and Nature is a beautifully-produced and theoretically challenging addition to the burgeoning field of Russian environmental history. The result of an impressively international and multidisciplinary research effort, the book mostly deals with the Russian North and Siberia, some of the regions most neglected by Russian historians. On the whole, it delivers a varied and sensitive portrayal of these places, attentive both to local difference and global connections. The editors introduce several thematic and methodological signposts that guide the essays. There is a substantial focus on watery environments, mostly seas and lakes, the latter of which Andy Bruno identifies as particularly under-researched by historians. The editors also see the collected essays as a REVIEWS 783 corrective to the overly negative versions of Russian, and especially Soviet, environmental histories that have marked the field. Finally, the volume’s authors have a strong commitment to ‘place-based environmental history’ (p. 5) the idea that to know an environment — even a historical environment — one needs to see and experience it. This commitment is reflected in the fact that all of the authors were involved in several group field trips to the places profiled in the book. Place and Nature has mixed success in fulfilling its editorial goals. Surprisingly few authors directly reference their interactions with the Russian environment. The middle section of photo essays is an exception. There, the beautiful colour photographs (congratulations to White Horse Press for allowing these) powerfully convey the emotional power of Russia’s lands and seas. Nicholas Breyfogle’s photo essay on the northern islands of Solovki is particularly effective, as he poignantly juxtaposes tranquil landscapes with the place’s hard history as one of the founding fathers of the gulag. David Moon, in his own photo essay on Lake Baikal, ponders the implications of starting Russian environmental histories in the country’s remote locations: perhaps the wealth of healthy forests and waters would rebalance evaluations of that country’s history in favour of the positive? At the same time, the group’s photographs from Baikal that year show dense smoke from nearby forest fires shrouding the lake’s shores, reminders of Siberia’s connections with global environmental histories and futures. Five of the book’s fourteen chapters deal directly with Lake Baikal, and they render an ambivalent judgment on the editors’ hope for a more positive Russian environmental history. Elena Kochetkova, in a deeply researched chapter on the Soviet state’s plans for Baikal, shows how the Irkutsk Academy of Sciences emerged as a...

Seeds of Power: Explorations in Ottoman Environmental History. Edited by Onur İnal and Yavuz Köse. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2019. 250 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $90.00.

<i>Seeds of Power: Explorations in Ottoman Environmental History</i>. Edited by Onur İnal and Yavuz Köse. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2019. 250 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $90.00.

Mike Richardson Interview

ABSTRACT Mike Richardson is the President and founder of Dark Horse Comics, the award-winning international publishing house he launched in 1986. This interview, undertaken in 2007, features conversation about comics history; the historical resonance and cultural importance of comics; the origins of Dark Horse Comics; ways in which comics and the various industries surrounding them have changed over time; the work and impact of Mike Mignola, Frank Miller, and Masamune Shirow; Conan and Frank Frazetta; the cultural impact of comics; Dark Horse Press and Dark Horse Entertainment.

Review of Iryna Starovoyt. A Field of Foundlings: Selected Poems.

Review of Iryna Starovoyt. A Field of Foundlings: Selected Poems. Translated from the Ukrainian by Grace Mahoney, Lost Horse Press, 2017. Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series 1. 92 pp. Illustrations. $21.00, paper.

Roger McNameeZucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

Yuri Izdryk Smokes Trans. Roman Ivashkiv & Erin Moure. Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2019. 103 pages. This useful translation of poems, culled from six books by renowned Ukrainian author Yuri Izdryk, makes the most of the facing-page translation format by allowing alphabets to drift across the center line, playfully mixing Cyrillic and Latin scripts in a way that both reduces and reinforces the distance between Ukrainian and English and thus between the poet and the anglophone reader. Such playfulness is appropriate in a translation of a poet so given to wordplay and pop culture allusions. While Roman Ivashkiv and Erin Moure don’t always reproduce the tight rhyming that connects Izdryk both to traditional poetry and to hip-hop culture in a way that may remind American readers of Michael Robbins, they do convey the poet’s tendency to run amok through etymology in lines like “a pandemic of anxiety and panic as panacea ” from the poem “Panpipe.” A deep restlessness as well as an intense privacy underlie the poet’s wordplay, both manifested in a refusal to let language settle into any clear and straightforward sense. Izdryk seems to be constantly seeking something or someone and constantly avoiding being found himself. In “Zoom,” the speaker says, “this house sits above thermal waters / where green is the grass on the rocks forever / there are no roads and no trails reach it,” one of many moments in which the poet situates the voice of the poem in an unreachable house or room, as if he is speaking to us but also reminding us that we cannot speak back. Interestingly, this dynamic is reversed as in a mirror when the poet often speaks to a God he is more than half certain is his own invention. In “Panpipe,” he writes, “reveal yourself speak your name show where you are / why can’t you hang loose about your creation.” In a poem called “Prayer,” it is not entirely clear, despite the poem’s title, if he is speaking to God or to a lover when he says, “when the world turns its back / and distances and walls rise between us / talk to me,” but as that last line gets repeated throughout the poem, the reader begins to hear a kind of desperation in the plea. Through slippery language and shifting imagery, Izdryk avoids being pinned down, but rather than coming off as distant and cold, this elusiveness makes the poetry seem all the more human, all the more relatable in its anxieties. Benjamin Myers Oklahoma Baptist University Roger McNamee Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe New York. Penguin. 2019. 336 pages. Why do we permit companies like Facebook and Google to gather behavioral data on minors? Why do we allow Google to scan our emails, including emails sent to us from people that are not linked to Google? And why do we let the large media companies of the twenty-first century get away with tailoring our online experience around the triggering and amplification of addictive patterns and largely negative emotional responses, which maximize our time spent on their platforms ? It has taken too long for questions regarding the societal impact of social-media platform business models to be voiced and then heard. One voice currently amplifying the much-needed criticism is that of Roger McNamee. McNamee had been a Silicon Valley tech investor for almost three decades and a tech optimist for even longer when he was asked to advise a twenty-two-year-old Mark Zuckerberg on a billion-dollar bid for his then-two-year-old company, Facebook. Over the three years that ensued, Zuckerberg chose to follow McNamee’s advice on several questions. Among other things, this resulted in Zuckerberg keeping control of his company as well as hiring Sheryl Sandberg as COO, which ended McNamee’s own advisory role with the young CEO. The role that McNamee played in the genesis of today’s Facebook imbued him with a sense of obligation to lay open and speak out against the effects of the business model the company adopted after Sandberg joined its ranks. The same model also drives Instagram and WhatsApp (both owned by Facebook) as well...

Mark

Mark Bruce Bond (bio) In Memoriam The waters of the eye come from somewhereand so continue, drawn up from the world we see, through the weep and writhe of blood that sees. Light oils the circle of light, our streets gleaming, our waters falling upwardafter the downpour. Long ago, I left this party. I wandered across the dark garden, alone, and saw a window propped against a tree. In it, the ghost of you, swallowed the momentI leaned a little closer. Me here, your name there, a little music in the distance inking the guestbook of someone else's novel. The word so bright it makes a smolder of us.It darkens the eye that opens to be signed. Something you said convinced me the great forgetting I feared most was just what this place needed. I love that. And still I fear it. Loathe it.Each name no less a stranger to the hand. By now, the party has turned a little sad. The flowers of the embers tell us, it's time. Time to linen the mirrors, as is our custom,to box each eye in tissues for the journey. [End Page 169] Light's needle pulls outward from its iris. And was that you who lay my head on its face, one eye open, another closed. You who taught methis. Read, you said. And so I started. [End Page 170] Bruce Bond Bruce Bond is the author of eighteen books including, most recently, Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, LSU), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press), Frankenstein's Children (Lost Horse Press), and Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions). Presently he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas. Copyright © 2019 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

The Eclipse of Urbanism and the Greening of Public Space: Image Making and the Search for a Commons in the United States, 1682–1865. By Mark Luccarelli. Cambridgeshire: The White Horse Press, 2016. 245 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. Hardcover $95.00.

<i>The Eclipse of Urbanism and the Greening of Public Space: Image Making and the Search for a Commons in the United States, 1682–1865</i>. By Mark Luccarelli. Cambridgeshire: The White Horse Press, 2016. 245 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. Hardcover $95.00.

Farming. Edited by Sarah Johnson. Winwick: White Horse Press, 2016. xiv + 428 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, graph, bibliography, and index. Paper $25.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsFarming. Edited by Sarah Johnson. Winwick: White Horse Press, 2016. xiv + 428 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, graph, bibliography, and index. Paper $25.00.Anna ZeideAnna Zeide Oklahoma State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 22, Number 4October 2017 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 8Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emx060 Views: 8Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref HistoryPublished online June 15, 2017 © 2017 The Author. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2020, Isis 111, no.S1S1 (Jan 2021): 1–317.https://doi.org/10.1086/713361

Assi Manifesto by Howard Scott

The poem that follows, “Ballad of the Word Trauma,” most clearly shows the bond that threads between many poems and in all sections of Net Needle. With attention to craft and detail, Adamson weaves together a book that captures the most enduring, most fragile landscape of all: living memory. Greg Brown Mercyhurst University Kuno Raeber. Watch Out: Selected Poems of Kuno Raeber. Trans. Stuart Friebert. Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2016. 90 pages. According to the back cover of Watch Out, “Many critics count [Raeber] among the more significant writers of the second half of the twentieth century.” I agree. Kuno Raeber’s exquisitely artful poems express a spiritual shift that fits many post–World War II psyches. These poems abandon religious dogma, arguing powerfully for the legitimacy of direct spiritual perception. Raeber was once a Jesuit novitiate. When that experience “ended in disaster,” he suffered a spiritual and psychological loss. “For me,” he said, “the church contained everything.” Depression took hold, but eventually Raeber discovered that the physical world could fuel expression of his spiritual intuitions. In Watch Out, his perceptive faculties reclaim ancient imagery and symbols , creating an old/new point of contact between the individual and a greater cosmos . “Upright, you’ll / shoot up at some point mute and shackled / on the stony seat in back, scared / from sleep and see / the rooster, its eyes smashed / to splinters, broken in pieces on the pavement . . . / But like then, remember? remember?, / a single cricket will / chirp . . . / And look, outside / there’s someone still pushing, like then, his new / bicycle by and whistling.” Raeber’s deep obsession is with reality, and in reality a lot goes on. You may be experiencing a moment fraught with finality and death, but someone else is enjoying his new bike. Raeber’s psyche is awake, upright, willing to connect directly. He sees, he accepts, he refuses to interpret, as in the poem “Twilight”: “Twilight and a gentle breeze / from the meadows. / The path / a snake alone / into the unknown and white.” Raeber also investigates man-made vistas . The third section of the book, “Steps, Winding,” focuses on cities, those Ozymandian edifices that attempt to create a foothold in eternity. In “New York,” he writes: “Skyscrapers as new / bodies for / Venetian senators torn / down in the construction and / endlessly erected / the processions / of scarabs / of pharaohs.” He describes Sixth Avenue where, despite man’s apparent control of the world, nature asserts itself: “An Uptown wind drags / Downtown the feathers / the down plastered with tar and mud / the avenue / Uptown Downtown torn / off by the east wind the feathers / filthy the down / plastered with tar and mud.” We build cities, then rebuild them, again and again as if this one, this last one, will stand forever. But cities fall while feathers , however besmirched, remain. Stuart Friebert’s long friendship with Raeber and close reading of these poems make him a superb translator. Using the poet’s vocabulary and rhythmic patterns, he brings Raeber to life, introducing us to a different kind of mystic—a realist whose aesthetically gorgeous spiritual investigations refuse to overreach. And in the end Raeber claims no definitive understanding of the cosmos. His poems issue no promises. No certificates of certainty. Life, for Raeber, is decidedly ambiguous: “Below / right at the bottom of the fountain suddenly / open expanse. Sails / next to the swans. But / up through the cracks / fumes of blood.” The “disaster” that ended Raeber’s stint as a Jesuit novitiate destroyed his sense of the world. Raeber’s poetic investigations mitigated the pain and filled the vacuum created by the breakdown of his early beliefs. He started over, rebuilding a relationship to his experience, to things he could know and things he had to accept as beyond his ken. Although the particulars of crises differ, many of us share this task. Raeber’s work is a window into a singular mind in the process of becoming conscious. His poems do not comfort, but they do provide challenging companionship . That alone is valuable, but in Raeber we also get word art of the highest order. Like Caravaggio, he understood that even in darkness and shadow, beauty persists. Deborah Bogen Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Natasha...

Net Needle

so it is compelled to be hypocritical in its denunciation of other [ideologies].” Toward the end of Vekerdy’s book, one finds two short pieces on education, the first of which is a sympathetic report from his visit to Boston in 2015 where he was invited by “Boskola,” a local Hungarian school, and the second (Dream about a school) describing the ideal school where the children are free to learn and play rather than just swallow chunks of information. Naplók könyve is organized on the same lines: it is both an entertaining and useful read from which we learn a lot about the author and his family as well as about the state of contemporary Hungarian society. George Gömöri London Verse Robert Adamson. Net Needle. Hexham, UK. Bloodaxe Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2016. 70 pages. In Net Needle, poet Robert Adamson spans the range of contemporary English prosody with poems that tenderly attest to an endangered environment. The book invites the reader to take these poems as a personal history. The first of four sections features mostly lyric poems. Adamson describes a childhood on the eastern Australian coast where old fishermen on Blue Point wove or mended their nets, where the urban mingled with the wild. This landscape is fifty years lost and sometimes so haunted that it becomes “difficult to move” there. Reflecting on this time and place in the poem “Via Negativa, the Divine Dark,” the speaker claims that he has “forgotten the names of most flora and fauna” and must reconcile himself to “forms / grown vague.” His attention to detail belies this sentiment. The men in the titular poem, “Net Makers,” populate his memory precisely with their craft and traditions. The second section becomes more dense and narrative: the poems are often in longer lines and stanzas. In “The SharkNet Seahorses of Balmoral,” the poet describes in third person the interior life of a boy as he snorkels in the bay, watching the wildlife of this protected sea. Adamson describes how “the boy looked for his favorite creatures, seahorses,” which hover “in clear sight of the old fish,” a dangerous predator rendered harmless on the other side of the shark net that encloses the bay. The seahorses, like the boy, are protected within the innocence of vague knowledge. Each of the four sections of Net Needle progresses thematically and prosodically. At the close of the second section, the main character becomes a young man serving hard time at Long Bay Penitentiary. In the third and fourth parts, there are lacunal, alliterative verses, prose poems, and fantastic pieces such as “Poem Beginning with a Line from William Blake,” which describes a kind of eight-story cabinet of curiosities. The first floor we visit is an apiary; on the eighth, we are challenged to “forget the myth of honey” and left searching “for the word trauma in the eyes / of strangers.” Wayne Miller Post— Milkweed Editions Wayne Miller’s newest collection calmly puzzles over a world striving against itself, toiling and disintegrating. Throughout, he presents scenes of disaster in an even tone, weaving them together toward a narrative of hope. Vadim Levental Masha Regina Trans. Lisa Hayden Oneworld The protagonist of Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina is a highly successful artist, but her rise in the film world may come at a painful price. Her story raises questions about the sacrifices required to re-create personal experiences in powerful art and whether these sacrifices are worthwhile. This novel’s portrayal of the artist’s coming-ofage as a profoundly philosophical experience illuminates the struggle between a compulsion for selfexpression and a desire to bury harmful memories forever. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 83 The poem that follows, “Ballad of the Word Trauma,” most clearly shows the bond that threads between many poems and in all sections of Net Needle. With attention to craft and detail, Adamson weaves together a book that captures the most enduring, most fragile landscape of all: living memory. Greg Brown Mercyhurst University Kuno Raeber. Watch Out: Selected Poems of Kuno Raeber. Trans. Stuart Friebert. Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2016. 90 pages. According to the back cover of Watch Out, “Many critics...

Watch Out: Selected Poems of Kuno Raeber by Stuart Friebert

The poem that follows, “Ballad of the Word Trauma,” most clearly shows the bond that threads between many poems and in all sections of Net Needle. With attention to craft and detail, Adamson weaves together a book that captures the most enduring, most fragile landscape of all: living memory. Greg Brown Mercyhurst University Kuno Raeber. Watch Out: Selected Poems of Kuno Raeber. Trans. Stuart Friebert. Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2016. 90 pages. According to the back cover of Watch Out, “Many critics count [Raeber] among the more significant writers of the second half of the twentieth century.” I agree. Kuno Raeber’s exquisitely artful poems express a spiritual shift that fits many post–World War II psyches. These poems abandon religious dogma, arguing powerfully for the legitimacy of direct spiritual perception. Raeber was once a Jesuit novitiate. When that experience “ended in disaster,” he suffered a spiritual and psychological loss. “For me,” he said, “the church contained everything.” Depression took hold, but eventually Raeber discovered that the physical world could fuel expression of his spiritual intuitions. In Watch Out, his perceptive faculties reclaim ancient imagery and symbols , creating an old/new point of contact between the individual and a greater cosmos . “Upright, you’ll / shoot up at some point mute and shackled / on the stony seat in back, scared / from sleep and see / the rooster, its eyes smashed / to splinters, broken in pieces on the pavement . . . / But like then, remember? remember?, / a single cricket will / chirp . . . / And look, outside / there’s someone still pushing, like then, his new / bicycle by and whistling.” Raeber’s deep obsession is with reality, and in reality a lot goes on. You may be experiencing a moment fraught with finality and death, but someone else is enjoying his new bike. Raeber’s psyche is awake, upright, willing to connect directly. He sees, he accepts, he refuses to interpret, as in the poem “Twilight”: “Twilight and a gentle breeze / from the meadows. / The path / a snake alone / into the unknown and white.” Raeber also investigates man-made vistas . The third section of the book, “Steps, Winding,” focuses on cities, those Ozymandian edifices that attempt to create a foothold in eternity. In “New York,” he writes: “Skyscrapers as new / bodies for / Venetian senators torn / down in the construction and / endlessly erected / the processions / of scarabs / of pharaohs.” He describes Sixth Avenue where, despite man’s apparent control of the world, nature asserts itself: “An Uptown wind drags / Downtown the feathers / the down plastered with tar and mud / the avenue / Uptown Downtown torn / off by the east wind the feathers / filthy the down / plastered with tar and mud.” We build cities, then rebuild them, again and again as if this one, this last one, will stand forever. But cities fall while feathers , however besmirched, remain. Stuart Friebert’s long friendship with Raeber and close reading of these poems make him a superb translator. Using the poet’s vocabulary and rhythmic patterns, he brings Raeber to life, introducing us to a different kind of mystic—a realist whose aesthetically gorgeous spiritual investigations refuse to overreach. And in the end Raeber claims no definitive understanding of the cosmos. His poems issue no promises. No certificates of certainty. Life, for Raeber, is decidedly ambiguous: “Below / right at the bottom of the fountain suddenly / open expanse. Sails / next to the swans. But / up through the cracks / fumes of blood.” The “disaster” that ended Raeber’s stint as a Jesuit novitiate destroyed his sense of the world. Raeber’s poetic investigations mitigated the pain and filled the vacuum created by the breakdown of his early beliefs. He started over, rebuilding a relationship to his experience, to things he could know and things he had to accept as beyond his ken. Although the particulars of crises differ, many of us share this task. Raeber’s work is a window into a singular mind in the process of becoming conscious. His poems do not comfort, but they do provide challenging companionship . That alone is valuable, but in Raeber we also get word art of the highest order. Like Caravaggio, he understood that even in darkness and shadow, beauty persists. Deborah Bogen Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Natasha...

Trees: Themes in Environmental History . Compiled by Sarah Johnson. Biggleswade: White Horse Press, 2015. 381 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, and index. Paper $25.00.

<i> Trees: Themes in Environmental History </i>. Compiled by Sarah Johnson. Biggleswade: White Horse Press, 2015. 381 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, and index. Paper $25.00.

Modern Pastoralism and Conservation: Old Problems, New Challenges. Edited by Troy Sternberg and Dawn Chatty. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2013. 210pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliographies, and index. Paper $40.00.

<i> Modern Pastoralism and Conservation: Old Problems, New Challenges. </i> Edited by Troy Sternberg and Dawn Chatty. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2013. 210pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliographies, and index. Paper $40.00.

The Steppe to Europe: An Environmental History of Hungary in the Traditional Age. By Lajos Rácz, translated by Alan Campbell. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2013. 257 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, bibliography, place name index, and index. Cloth $100.00.

<i>The Steppe to Europe: An Environmental History of Hungary in the Traditional Age</i>. By Lajos Rácz, translated by Alan Campbell. Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2013. 257 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, bibliography, place name index, and index. Cloth $100.00.