A Luminous Uplift, Landscape & Memory

"They are a form of language on landscape, a form of inscape, that, intimate and moving, are also arresting and revelatory."-- Arthur Sze A Luminous Uplift is a rich compendium of John Brandi's new and selected prose spanning four decades of investigative travels through the American Southwest to the far reaches of the Himalaya. John Brandi's selection of writings over the last four decades opens with his awakening to landscape and poetry during his upbringing in California, his counterculture years in the Sixties, and his Peace Corps work with indigenous farmers in the Andes. Essays on his multiple visits to India, Sikkim and Nepal, with vivid descriptions of Khajuraho's erotic temples, the ritual dances of Kerala, the monasteries of the Himalaya, move from the physical landscape to the literary, with his discovery of Ghalib's poetry and his reflections on Baudelaire while lost in the crowds of Mumbai. Brandi roves in these pages from the sky villages of Hopi, the Deer Dance of Taos, walkabouts with Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki, to his practice of haiku in the New Mexico mesa lands he has made his home.

ISBN-13: 9781945680663

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: White Pine Press (NY)

Publication Date: 10-31-2023

Pages: 260

Product Dimensions: 9.00h x 5.80w x 1.10d

John Brandi (b. Los Angeles, 1943) grew up in California, whose coast, mountains and deserts impacted his early life. After graduating from Cal State Northridge (1965), he worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer with Quechua farmers in the Ecuadorian Andes. In 1971 he moved to New Mexico, where he still resides. A recipient a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, he is an ardent traveler, with dozens of publications issued at home and abroad. Recent books include: The Way to Thorong La (Empty Bowl Press), The Great Unrest (White Pine Press) and Into the Dream Maze, limited-edition haibun poems with hand-colored drawings (Palace Press, Santa Fe). In 2017 he received a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award for A House By Itself: Selected Haiku of Masaoka Shiki (White Pine Press). Brandi has made a living on his craft: teaching, lectures on poetry, haiku and the spirit of travel, and by assisting students in writing programs abroad. He gave the keynote address for the Haiku North America Conference in Ottawa Canada and for the Punjabi Haiku Conference, India (2010).