Lighted Distances: Four Seasons on Goodlow Rim

by John Daniel

Meditations on nature and life from award-winning poet and nature writer John Daniel. "Dryside / I look out and far." That brief phrase near the start of John Daniel's new hybrid work of meditative poetry with interspersed prose orients the reader to his setting and his program, for in LIGHTED FOUR SEASONS ON GOODLOW RIM his vision indeed ranges far beyond his southcentral Oregon locus over an expanse of both landscape and thought. Composed in spare tercets, these poems are pure distillations of experience, most often reflecting on nature and our place in it, a fragile environment made all the more tenuous as Daniel's documents his own encounter with mortality. He contextualizes the poems through mini-essays touching on big topics -- cosmology, geology, evolution, consciousness -- all leading him to conclude "The purpose of the cosmos, in some still unconscious way, might be looking out through our own eyes, and the eyes of all the lives of Nature." And as he looks out, he also looks "The dryside seemed an open secret / that might lead me / to me." This volume records his journey toward greater self-awareness, one on which we are privileged to accompany him, and through which we might find ourselves as well. "If the cosmos can be a landscape, John Daniel peoples the horizon with winsome enigmas. His book brims with detailed observation and abundant thought by glimpse and glance, by three-line fragments and concise meditations. Thickets of words in prose alternate with spare "dryside" glints to form a mix that feels essential to the book's cosmic view. Daniel gives readers abundant room for musing, wondering, and the thought required to recalibrate one's bargain with this life in space and time. Read this and be part of incandescent starlight."--Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar "John Daniel's writing has always been a North Star. Reading Lighted Distances is refreshing and clarifying, a mighty breath. This precious world still shines, still revives us, and Daniel's work always guides us back into deeper love for it in some new way."--Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Voices in the Air & The Tiny Journalist "John Daniel's seasonal round of haiku-like poems reminds me of Matsuo Bash?'s great travel record, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. But while Bash? wandered the northern reaches of 17th-century Japan, Daniel hunkers down in Oregon's remote high desert. Reporting on the doings of the locals--the deer, coyotes, hawks, junipers, aspens, clouds, and occasional humans he shares his days with-- he detects a "glint of sentience" everywhere he looks. With prose interludes on cosmology and the origins of consciousness, Lighted Distances reverberates with insight and wonder." --Charles Goodrich, author of Watering the Rhubarb Poetry.

130 pages, Paperback

Published April 15, 2023

About the author

Born in South Carolina and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., John Daniel has lived in the West since 1966. After attending and dropping out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, he worked as a logger, railroad inspector, rock climbing instructor, hod carrier, and poet-in-the-schools. He began to write poetry and prose in the 1970s while living on a ranch in south-central Oregon. In 1982 he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, where he then took an M.A. in English/Creative Writing and taught five years as a Jones Lecturer in Poetry and a lecturer in Freshman English. He now makes his living as a writer and itinerant teacher in workshops and writer-in-residence positions around the country. 

Reviews

[Meli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this, and the experience was enhanced by having heard the author read from the book, because I could imagine it in his voice.