WINTER
Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods
by Dana Wilde
Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods
by Dana Wilde
"In my life lived mostly below the 34th parallel north, I've only visited Maine once, twenty years ago, in November, to visit the naturalist who writes sentences that have the structure and clout of excellent haiku. "The pond was slate-gray and flat, in that hunter's stillness November balances on." Reading Wilde's Winter is like strolling in the woods with a Japanese master, one who punctuates his narrative with poetic jewels dropped simply and effortlessly along the way, jewels that have the ability not only to observe and describe but to evoke and teach us about both the environment and those who inhabit it. Namely, ourselves."
--Richard Collins, author of No Fear Zen "From first signs or unseen sense of Fall's closing in, to the certain loosening thaws and drips prefacing ice out, from First Peoples' tellings and showings to the habits of next inhabitants here, now, and in whatever untamed future survives the changing climate, this book is a fire for the darks and lights of winter in Maine. And a source, as any fire is, of realization, solace, and meditation burning perfectly, steadfastly, through Winter's grief and any joy to be found. Season by season, discovery by revelation, no one in Maine works harder, truer, nor more beautifully and imaginatively than Dana Wilde." --Patricia Ranzoni, author of Settling and Bedding Vows “Dana Wilde has a scientist's curiosity and a poet's imagination. This man has star marrow in his bones. Pay attention.” --Tom Sexton, Poet Laureate of Alaska 1995-2000 “The naturalist, says Emerson, must satisfy all the demands of the spirit. Dana Wilde does that by uniquely unifying acute perception with that transcendental metaphysic that Emerson unabashedly called Love. Wilde is the poet of facts, his science always in the service of reverence and his universal intimations of spirit never “the easy gold of fay or elf,” as Robert Frost praised a practice of the natural supernatural. 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. Every essay in this book can teach us like parables of understanding and reason how to unite devotion and thought to be whole people in our waking lives.” --William Hathaway, author of Dawn Chorus and The Right No |
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Read Dave Morrison's review of Winter in Working Waterfront. _____________________ In winter, snow and ice are everything. Or used to be, until the last few years when the effects of climate change have become plain to see. In this new collection of writings, a companion book to Summer to Fall, Dana pieces together frosty images of pre-winter stillness, the disappearing and reappearing sun, the depths of snow, the dog of March, and the once and future climate, where Maine winters turn out to be a climatological barometer. This book of funny, worried, thoughtful, poetic essays will help readers keep warm through to spring.
Dana Wilde lives in Troy, Maine, and writes the Backyard Naturalist column which appears regularly in the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel newspapers, and originated in years past as the award-winning Amateur Naturalist column in the Bangor Daily News. He has been a college professor, editor, Fulbright scholar, and NEH fellow. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern Maine and doctoral and master’s degrees from Binghamton University, where his doctoral dissertation, Ursa Major: Essays in Outer Space, was recognized as the Distinguished Dissertation in the Humanities and Fine Arts for 1995, in part for its efforts to bridge the “two cultures” of science and the humanities. His writings appear regularly in The Working Waterfront newspaper, and have appeared in many popular, literary, and scholarly publications, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Quest, Alexandria: Journal of the Western Cosmological Traditions, Mystics Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, North American Review, The Maine Entomologist, and many others.
Books A Backyard Book of Spiders in Maine (2020) Summer to Fall: Notes and Numina from the Maine Woods (2016) Nebulae: A Backyard Cosmography (2012) The Other End of the Driveway (2011) The Big Picture (1983) 
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