The Land's Wild Music: Encounters with Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin

by Mark Tredinnick

The Land's Wild Music explores the home terrains and the writing of four great American writers of place―Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin. In their work and its relationship with their home places, Tredinnick, an Australian writer, searches for answers to such questions such as whether it’s possible for a writer to make an authentic witness of a place; how one captures the landscape as it truly is; and how one joins the place in witness so that its lyric becomes one’s own and enters into one’s own work. He asks what it might mean to enact an ecological imagination of the world and whether it might be possible to see the work―and the writer―as part of the place itself. The work is a meditation on the nature of landscape and its power to shape the lives and syntax of men and women. It is animated by the author’s encounters with Lopez, Matthiessen, Williams, and Galvin, by critical readings of their work, and by the author’s engagement with the landscapes that have shaped these writers and their writing―the Cascades, Long Island, the Colorado Plateau, and the high prairies of the Rocky Mountains. Tredinnick seeks “the spring of nature writing deep in the nature of a place itself, carried in a writer’s wild self inside and resonated over and over again at the desk until it is a work in which the place itself sings.”

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction

384 pages, Paperback

First published September 29, 2005

About the author

Mark Tredinnick (born 1962) is a celebrated Australian poet, essayist and teacher. Winner of the Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011 and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2012. He is the author of thirteen books, including four volumes of poetry (Bluewren Cantos, Fire Diary, The Lyrebird, The Road South); The Blue Plateau; The Little Red Writing Book and "Writing Well: the Essential Guide." For twenty years he has taught poetry, grammar, creative nonfiction and business prose in Sydney and around the world.

Reviews

[Jacqui · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book at the height of my addiction to Matthiessen. I'd read everything he'd written and wanted more. Mark Treddinnick's The Land's Wild Music was advertised as a collection of nature writers, including Matthiessen, so I assumed I'd get a boatload of essays with a similar passion, insight, an innate ability to see into the soul of nature.

I now know that was an unreasonable goal, but, unfortunately, my opinion of Treddinnick's encounters (his word) has forever been shaded by my sky high expectations. There is no other Matthiessen. If I'd known that going in, I would have been more accepting of the writings contained in this book. They are, after all, excellent examples of some of the best names in the nature writing genre--

* The Edge of the Trees by Barry Lopez
* The Heart of an Arid Land by Terry Tempest Williams
* The Real World by James Galvin

As I look back on the book, I realize that it did expand my horizons of nature writers by presenting a side of the genre I hadn't experienced, one that I'm not entirely comfortable with, but valid none the less.Here are some excerpts:

* ...that kind of enterprise, that sense of geologic time, that feeling for the larger order of life, that placement of the present human moment in the broader scheme of things...
* ...I point to a shrubby tree, one of many of its kind I've noticed crowding a logged slope, its leaves the shape and color of an olive.
* We are standing high above the Horse Creek drainage, looking inland over the Three Sisters wilderness area. The spine of the Cascade range, running north and south, rises in three places before us.
* I find myself swimming toward an eddy in the river, slow water, warmer water. We are whirling, twirling in a community of currents.
* Both the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau belong to the same weather; they are dry and full of sage.
* The section borders the three hundred and twenty acres-- 'that almost imaginary thatch of peat bog surrounded by low hills and tall stands of lodgepole pine, with its own ocean of sage-gray-prairie lapping on tits shores and the whole Medicine Bow Range to drink in every day'.

Do you see what I mean? At times, it reads like talking to a brilliant scientist whose thoughts rest more in theory than the world around him. These essays hover above the land, not quite plumbing its true nature (although that last excerpt is pretty close). The words are slightly off center because I don't believe the writer felt it as Matthiessen does. I don't either, which is why I gave up the goal of being a nature writer. The best I could do was appreciate a well-written essay, not reproduce it myself.

Do you get those feelings when you read about nature in books? That feeling of oneness, of respect, of a shared goal?

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

At once a primer on writing and reading environmental / nature / landscape literature (call it what you will), The Land’s Wild Music is also a detailed study on, and set of conversations with, four prominent writers, all of whom approach writing about the land from different angles and with different intentions.

This is a text that bites off almost more than it can chew, but it’s this very ambition and subject range that makes the book a meaningful and worthwhile read, as Treddinick manages to mostly synthesize the four authors approaches along with his. He does this by showing that there are crucial connective threads that tie a wide range of nature writing together, and he makes a compelling case for this type of writing to be purposeful and active, in hopes that, at the very least, writing can deepen our connection to the land.

For someone who is still pretty green (pun intended) in the greater world of environmental / nature / landscape writing, I found The Land’s Wild Music to be a great jumping off point both as a source for further reading and for ways of framing and approaching literature about one’s relationship to the land.