Summer to Fall
Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods


by Dana Wilde
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     Summer to Fall is a collection of excursions through Maine's woods and fields during the time of "the most gorgeous weather in the world." Inside these essays are the science and experience of what the world looks like when you turn a transparent eye to the energies bubbling up in the flora, fauna and summer starlight of backyard Maine.
“Dana Wilde is an acute, entertaining and knowledgeable​ observer of and guide to Maine’s natural scene throughout the year. It’s good to have this fine book, full of delightful surprises and amusing quirkiness, for all seasons.”
—SANFORD PHIPPEN, author of Kitchen Boy and Sturge, and host of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network’s television series A Good Read.

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“Dana Wilde is not an excursionist, but a seer who observes the comprehensive, year-round fluidity of nature surrounding him and the eternal cosmos above him from his backyard in Troy, Maine. He is the best of the real thing, letting the obdurate bleakness and the rampant beauty of Maine inform each other in wit that is invariably wise and intimate.”
—WILLIAM HATHAWAY, author of The Right No, Sightseer and Promeneur Solitaire

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“On some level we know that we are ‘out of order,’ exiled from what we call the ‘natural world.’ We catch glimpses—experience moments of a truer correspondence. Dana Wilde has made a practice of preserving those glimpses, mostly within the confines of his own backyard and surrounding acres. These essays draw on a lifetime of such quiet observation—I want to say, ‘observances.’ Reading them, I always feel both newly informed and importantly reminded.”
—JIM BISHOP, author of Mother Tongue and Jim Bishop Reads

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“Dana Wilde is a master noticer and sharer of what it means to be an alert human in relation to other species and systems of our planet and universe, from flowers to stars, believing them to be one and the same frame. This accessible account of signs, secret and not-so-secret seasonal wonders and mysteries, interspecies communications, interdependences, and so much more, will see one through any kind of winter or wait.”
—PATRICIA RANZONI, author of Bedding Vows and Settling
    Dana Wilde is a columnist and book reviewer for the Central Maine newspapers, the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. His columns have received Maine Press Association and New England Newspaper & Press Association awards, and his most recent book is Nebulae: A Backyard Cosmography. His other writings have appeared widely over the last five decades in Maine publications such as The Working Waterfront, Maine Boats Homes & Harbors, Island Journal and Cafe Review, as well as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The North American Review and Exquisite Corpse, among many others. He has served as a Fulbright scholar in China and South Africa, and as an NEH fellow and college professor, and holds degrees from the University of Southern Maine and Binghamton University. He lives in Troy, Maine, with his wife, Bonnie Woellner.
PRAISE FOR "SUMMER TO FALL"

  From George Smith, Bangor Daily News

From Maine Sunday Telegram

From Working Waterfront
Also on Kindle and Nook