A Desert Harvest
New and Selected Essays
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A career-spanning collection of Bruce Berger’s beautiful, subtle, and spiky essays on the American desert
Occupying a space between traditional nature writing, memoir, journalism, and prose poetry, Bruce Berger’s essays are beautiful, subtle, and haunting meditations on the landscape and culture of the American Southwest. Combining new, unpublished essays with selections from his acclaimed trilogy of “desert books”—The Telling Distance, There Was a River, and Almost an Island—A Desert Harvest is a career-spanning selection of the best work by this unique and undervalued voice.
Wasteland architecture, mountaintop astronomy, Bach in the wilderness, the mind of the wood rat, the canals of Phoenix, and the numerous eccentric personalities who call the desert their home all come to life in these fascinating portraits of America’s seemingly desolate terrains.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and essayist Berger (The End of the Sherry) reminisces in this collection about his life in the American Southwest and and Baja California Sur, capturing the effects of arid yet vibrant landscapes on the psyche. These lyrical, usually brief pieces delight and sometimes frustrate in their insistence on specificity. Berger watches an eclipse in La Paz, where the influx of tourists pales in comparison to attendance at Carnaval, and, in a single-page essay, proposes that desert sunsets are most awe-inspiring when one looks eastward, at the "last rays, deflected through clear skies, fall on the long, minutely eroded mountain ranges and bathe our eyes with light of decreasing wavelength and cooling colors." Even in pieces less directly concerned with the desert, Berger remains focused on place. In one of the longer essays, he reflects on how the English word privacy has recently entered the Spanish vocabulary, perhaps due to large numbers of La Paz inhabitants returning home from living in the "privacy-oriented States." At times, the essays meander and get bogged down in detail, but at their best, Berger imbues his rich images with an enticing sense of narrative possibility and symbolic meaning. Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated part of the book took place in La Paz, Bolivia, rather than La Paz, Baja California Sur.
