The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology

by Robert Bringhurst
Counterpoint, 2007

The Tree of Meaning presents thirteen superb and surprising lectures on language,  storytelling, mythology, comparative literature, humanity, and the breadth of oral and literate culture.

Bringhurst’s “ecological linguistics” includes studies of Native American art and illuminating essays about Haida culture, the process of translation, and the relationship between being and language. A companion collection of speeches and lectures by Bringhurst, Everywhere Being Is Dancing: TwentyPieces of Thinking, is also highly recommended.

Robert Bringhurst is a poet, translator, linguist, and typographer. He has published more than a dozen books of poetry, and his manual The Elements of Typographic Style has become one of the most influential contemporary texts on typographic design. He has worked for many years with Native American texts. He lives on Quadra Island off British Columbia.

Island World: A History of Hawai’i and the United States

By Gary Y. Okihiro
University of California Press, 2008

In Island World, Gary Y. Okihiro reconsiders the traditional idea that the United States acts upon and dominates Hawai’i without the Islands in turn acting upon the mainland U.S. Using geology, folklore, music, cultural commentary, and history, Okihiro reveals Hawaiians fighting in the Civil War, sailing on nineteenth-century New England ships, and living in pre-gold rush California. He points to Hawai’i’s lingering effect on twentieth-century American culture—from surfboards, hula, sports, and films, to art, imagination, and racial perspectives—even as the islands themselves succumb slowly to the continental United States. This book not only revises the way we think about islands, oceans, and continents, but also recasts the way we write about place and history.(Publisher’s description)

Gary Y. Okihiro is Professor of International and Public Affairs and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. His recent works include Common Ground: Reimagining American History.

The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants

By Bern Mulvey
Cleveland State University Press, Cleveland  2008

Tamura-cho (a small village in Fukui Prefecture) is the setting for The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants, poems that touch on identity, assimilation, conflict, death, forgiveness, and redemption. The title refers to the original ideographs (fat and sheep) that make up the modern Japanese character for beauty. This is not a tourist travelogue — the author writes from the perspective of someone both fluent in the language and conversant in the modern literature. Indeed, these poems can be seen as a challenge to the traditional representations of Japan in Western creative literature, participating instead in the flux of Japan’s modern literary styles and themes (e.g., the work of Ibaraki Noriko, Itou Hiromi, Takamura Koutarou, Asada Saho, Tawara Machi, etc.) and evolving the dialectic between them. (Publisher’s description)

Bern Mulvey has written poems, articles and essays in English and in Japanese. He is Dean of Faculty at Miyazaki International College in Japan, one of three non-Japanese to hold this rank at a Japanese university.

Dark Hope

By David Shulman
University of Chicago Press, 2007

In Dark Hope, American-born Israeli David Shulman takes readers into the heart of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Dark Hope is an eye-opening chronicle of Shulman’s work as a member of the peace group Ta‘ayush, which takes its name from the Arabic for “living together.” Though Shulman never denies the complexity of the issues fueling the conflict—nor the culpability of people on both sides—he forcefully clarifies the injustices perpetrated by Israel by showing us the human dimension of the occupation. Here we meet Palestinians whose houses have been blown up by the Israeli army, shepherds whose sheep have been poisoned by settlers, farmers stripped of their land by Israel’s dividing wall. We watch as whip-swinging police on horseback attack crowds of nonviolent demonstrators, as Israeli settlers shoot innocent Palestinians harvesting olives, and as families and communities become utterly destroyed by the unrelenting violence of the occupation.

David Shulman was born in Iowa but moved to Israel in 1967 at the age of eighteen. Named MacArthur Fellow in 1987, Shulman is the author or coauthor of nineteen books. (Publisher’s description)

Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and beyond

Edited by: Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal,
and Ravi Shankar
V.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008

This ambitious yet accessible gathering of hundreds of poets from various parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, America, and elsewhere is likely to excite poetry fans as well as those new to poetry. Divided into nine idiosyncratic sections—with titles like “Bowl of Air and Shivers” that cover topics including Eros and the meeting of the political and the personal—the book is more an esoteric journey than a systematic reference. Readers may recognize the names of major international figures (Nazim Hikmet, Taha Muhammad Ali) and famous American writers (Michael Ondaatje, Li-Young Lee), who may draw attention to many writers unknown in the U.S., such as Hsien Min Toh of Singapore, who, upon seeing sport hunters shooting crows, awakens to an all-too-familiar ambivalence about “my unkind nation, in whose name only I will be/ able to walk up the lane with lowered head.” While the book’s sheer size can be overwhelming, it is packed with treasures. (Publishers Weekly)

The Steel Veil

By Jack Marshall
Coffee House Press, 2008

Jack Marshall’s new poems wed depictions of Middle Eastern widows “behind veils heavy / as the steel / veil of empire” with expressions of personal grief and political outrage. Marshall’s distinctive voice and elegant lyrics unite this multilayered collection.

Born in 1936 to Jewish parents who emigrated from Iraq and Syria, Jack Marshall grew up in New York and lives in California. His previous work includes his memoir, From Baghdad to Brooklyn, and works of poetry. (Publisher’s description)

America & Other Poems

By Ayukawa Nobuo, selected and translated by Shogo Oketani and Leza Lowitz
Kaya Press, 2008

America and Other Poems is the first English translation of a single volume by the Japanese Modernist poet, Nobuo Ayukawa. One of Japan’s most influential yet overlooked poets, Ayukawa was an important voice for peace and probity in the years that followed World War II and the collapse of Japan’s rationale for war. This selection spans from 1947 through 1976, and includes work ranging from early writings about the poet’s experience on the front line to later poems focused on the influence of Western culture on Japanese society. Ayukawa’s lyrical, complex poetry offers a rare perspective on war from an ordinary Japanese soldier’s point of view. It also provides a window into the complex post-war relationship between Japan and America, and between European literary culture and the Japanese struggle to make sense of post-War accountability. (Publisher’s description)

No Bottom

By Mike Newell
Xoxox Press, 2008

Working on seasonal wildfires in the 1970’s and 1980’s across Alaskan tundra and mountain ranges, wildland firefighter Mike Newell developed a deep appreciation for an arctic and subarctic landscape whose scale dwarfs all human effort. Returning each fire season, Newell found himself increasingly transfixed by the primal allure of the Alaskan bush. Years later, he paused in a bookshop and pulled Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams off the shelf. What he found there began to engender in Newell a sense of what one reader has described as “learned understanding of wild places.” The chance encounter with Lopez’s National Book Award winning non-fiction work began a pattern of inquiry for Newell that, over twenty years later, now culminates in the publication of No Bottom. Newell’s book features an incisive interview with Barry Lopez accompanied by a careful inquiry into Lopez’s short fiction books. Both the interview and the critical inquiry serve well as a primer for those coming new to Barry Lopez’s work and as a valuable source of insight for scholars.

Mike Newell is the author of three books of poetry —Underground Fires, The Unlived Life and Aestivation—and the newly-issued No Bottom. Following his early years as a wildland firefighter, Newell taught at-risk students in public schools and correctional facilities for over two decades, retiring in 2004. After a 19-year hiatus from firefighting in Alaska, he re-certified his fire qualifications in 2000 and went to work on western wildfires. Mike Newell lives and writes in upstate New York. (Publisher’s description)

Does the Land Remember Me: A Memoir of Palestine

By Aziz Shihab

Syracuse University Press, 2006.

Summoned by his dying mother, Palestinian-born Aziz Shihab returns from Texas to the homeland he and his family fled as refugees decades earlier. He finds an Israeli-occupied land no longer the one of his youth. This gripping book chronicles his month-long journey to capture a piece of the land that haunts him, revealing the complexities of leaving behind the past and coming to grips with its abandonment. With his sharp ear for dialogue and his professional journalist’s eye, Shihab records and considers, sometimes with humor, the Palestinian psyche. (Publisher’s description)

Aziz Shihab is known for his independent newspaper, The Arab Star. He has written about the Middle East for the Dallas Morning News and the San Antonio Express-News.

Just Breathe Normally

By Peggy Shumaker. 

University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

In the wake of her near-fatal cycling collision, Peggy Shumaker searches for meaning within extremity. Through a long convalescence, she meditates on the meaning of justice and the role of love in the grueling process of healing.

Shumaker’s memoir explores our desire to understand the fragmented self, using the power of words to restore what medical science cannot: the fragile human psyche and its immense capacity for forgiveness. (Publisher’s description)

Peggy Shumaker is professor emerita of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the author of several books of poetry, including Blaze and Underground Rivers. She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.