Poetry. OLD TALE ROAD, Andrew Schelling's first full collection of poetry in six years, is a visionary work of crisply detailed language and wide-ranging content. It balances the ecological, mythic, and personal realms, while carrying the flavor of American ballads or blues. There are poems in haibun form, lyric songs, linked-verse, and a Noh play. The personae of OLD TALE ROAD include friends, ghosts, lovers, Buddhist monks, dead poets, mountain spirits, and the strangely named animals of the American West. "Andrew Schelling is the latest incarnation in an American poetic lineage that began with the Transcendentalists and moved west with Rexroth and Snyder: the unlikely and fortuitous conjunction of wilderness expertise, the observational precision of a natural historian, homegrown radical politics, and an immersion in Asian philosophy and writing"—Eliot Weinberger.

Author Hometown: BOULDER, CO USA



About the author: Andrew Schelling lives in the Southern Rocky Mountains, dividing his time between Boulder, Colorado, and a former mining camp in the Indian Peaks. He has worked on land use in the American West, ecology, and wolf reintroduction. Recent books include FROM THE ARAPAHO SONGBOOK (poetry; La Alameda Press, 2011), OLD TALE ROAD (poetry; Empty Bowl Press, 2008) and WILD FORM, SAVAGE GRAMMAR: POETRY, ECOLOGY, ASIA (essays; La Alameda Press, 2003). For thirty years he has studied Sanskrit and Indian raga, and published seven books of translation from India's early poets, most recently a revised edition of DROPPING THE BOW: POEMS OF ANCIENT INDIA (White Pine Press, 2008). He teaches at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School and at Deer Park Institute in India's bird-rich Himalayan foothills.