Description
Poetry. THE FACTS AT DOG TANK SPRING is Andrew Schelling's first book of poetry in seven years. Following his folkloric study Tracks Along the Left Coast, his new book speaks largely to an American West lying inland: the Indian Peaks, canyons and ranges of the Colorado Plateau, the Arkansas and Apishapa rivers, the Sangre de Cristo range. Schelling's immersion in the traditions of Europe and Asia are evident, with echoes of Shakespeare, women poets of old India, and classical Chinese verse. He salts poems of love and companionship with grieving words to deceased friends, fury at ecological damage, or mischief surrounding riddles and the origins of strange words. As in previous books he keeps to the oldest charges of poetry: to converse with the dead, to cock a skeptical eye on the overhead stars, to invoke the fertility of animals, to record the present era with a touch of humor as it passes. In the end, past the poems, it is the land that is "Tao te Ching / and Farmer's Almanac crunched by three / billion years into one granite treatise." THE FACTS AT DOG TANK SPRING holds the historical range and ecological conscience of all Schelling's poetry, essays, or translations.
Author Bio
Andrew Schelling, poet and translator. Author of twenty-odd books including THE FACTS AT DOG TANK SPRING (Dos Madres Press, 2020), Arapaho Songbook, and THE REAL PEOPLE OF WIND AND RAIN (Singing Horse Press, 2014). In the 1970s he studied classics with Norman O. Brown and ecology of mind with Gregory Bateson at U.C. Santa Cruz, then up to Berkeley for Sanskrit while editing samizdat poetry journals. In 1990 he moved over the Continental Divide to the Front Range of the Southern Rockies with his wife and daughter. Schelling worked on land use, wolf reintroduction, defiance to dams, and protection of wilderness. He translated eight books of poetry from Sanskrit & related tongues. His study Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture is a folkloric account of bohemian poets, old time West Coast storytelling, natural history, cattle rustling, & linguistics. He has spent many years teaching poetry and Sanskrit at Naropa University, he lives in the mountains west of Boulder, Colorado.
Author City: BOULDER, CO USA