 |
|
 |
 |
| At its heart, Terry Tempest Williams’ new collection, Red, is a celebration of wildness. A naturalist and conservationist of Utah’s redrock deserts, Williams establishes immediately the scope of her subject here: “people + places = politics.” But Red is no ordinary treatise. For Williams, author of Refuge, aspires to get beyond the vague and jargon-laden rhetoric common to conservation philosophy, and in this she succeeds with dazzling, if occasionally uneven, force. With Red, she brings her politics to the fore without abandoning the intimacy and lyricism of her past work. Each of the book’s three sections uses the diverse voices of story to transcend philosophical abstraction. “Coyote’s Canyon” unearths a mythology of place and of humans’ connection to the land. “Red” considers community and responsibility through a diversity of story forms: essays and letters, new legends of the desert landscape and Williams’ testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Forest and Public Lands Management. In the final section, “Desert Quartet,” Williams proposes an erotics of place in a deeply intimate set of essays dedicated to Earth, water, fire, and air. Throughout, the stories are disparate and interwoven, diverse in form and subject but unified in theme and lyricism, and the overall effect is of both chorus and collage. Of course, sustaining such vivid and courageous poetics is a difficult task, and Williams’ prose feels sometimes excessive or overprecious. But even in moments when her pitch is imperfect, Red remains a compelling testament to the elemental kinship between human and landscape. – Reviewed by Tricia Brick |
|
 |
|