Book : The Solace Of Open Spaces - Ehrlich, Gretel

-Titulo Original : The Solace Of Open Spaces

-Fabricante :

Penguin Books

-Descripcion Original:

A collection of transcendent, lyrical essays on life in the American West, the classic companion to Gretel Ehrlich’s new book, Unsolaced“Wyoming has found its Whitman.” -Annie DillardPoet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of documentaries when her partner died. Ehrlich stayed on and found she couldn’t leave. The Solace of Open Spaces is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming,” a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life. Ehrlich captures both the otherworldly beauty and cruelty of the natural forces-the harsh wind, bitter cold, and swiftly changing seasons-in the remote reaches of the American West. She brings depth, tenderness, and humor to her portraits of the peculiar souls who also call it home: hermits and ranchers, rodeo cowboys and schoolteachers, dreamers and realists. Together, these essays form an evocative and vibrant tribute to the life Ehrlich chose and the geography she loves. Originally written as journal entries addressed to a friend, The Solace of Open Spaces is raw, meditative, electrifying, and uncommonly wise. In prose “as expansive as a Wyoming vista, as charged as a bolt of prairie lightning” (Newsday), Ehrlich explores the magical interplay between our interior lives and the world around us. Review Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Whether shes reflecting on natures teachings, divulging her experiences as a cowpuncher, or painting vivid word portraits of the people she lives and works with, Gretel Ehrlichs observations are lyrical and funny, wise and authentic. After moving from the city to a vast new state, she writes of adjusting to cowboy life, boundless open spaces, and the almost incomprehensible harshness of a Wyoming winter:When its fifty below, the mercury bottoms out and jiggles there as if laughing at those of us still above ground. Once I caught myself on tiptoes, peering down into the thermometer as if there were an extension inside inscribed with higher and higher declarations of physical misery: ninety below to the power of ten and so on.After experiencing the isolated life of a sheep herder, she writes, Keenly observed the world is transformed. The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient.Ehrlichs gift is one of subtle precision. She writes beauty into the plainest of thoughts and meaning into the simplest of ideas: True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere. --Kathryn True Review Praise for Gretel Ehrlich and The Solace of Open Spaces:Any one of [its 12 chapters] stands beautifully on its own . . . She brings the long vistas into focus with the poise of an Ansel Adams. -The New York Times Book ReviewA stunning rumination on life on Wyomings High Plains . . . Ehrlichs gorgeous prose is as expansive as a Wyoming vista, as charged as a bolt of prairie lightning. -Newsday Ehrlichs best prose belongs in a league with Annie Dillard and even Thoreau. The Solace of Open Spaces releases the bracing air of the wilderness into the stuffy, heated confines of winter in civilization. -San Francisco ChronicleEhrlich [is] a gifted essayist and nature writer. -The Washington PostVivid, tough, and funny . . . an exuberant and powerful book. -Annie Dillard About the Author Gretel Ehrlich is the author of This Cold Heaven, The Future of Ice, Heart Mountain, Facing the Wave, and The Solace of Open Spaces, among other works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Ehrlich studied at Bennington College and UCLA film school. She lives in Wyoming.