Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World - Softcover

Hogan, Linda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393322475 ISBN 13: 9780393322477

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007

Synopsis

Award-winning Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan explores her lifelong love of the living world and all its inhabitants.

"We want to live as if there is no other place," Hogan tells us, "as if we will always be here. We want to live with devotion to the world of waters and the universe of life." In offering praise to sky, earth, water, and animals, she calls us to witness how each living thing is alive in a conscious world with its own integrity, grace, and dignity. In Dwellings, Hogan takes us on a spiritual quest borne out of the deep past and offers a more hopeful future as she seeks new visions and lights ancient fires.

About this title

About the Author:

Linda Hogan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Mean Spirit. Her other honors include an American Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Tishomingo, Oklahoma.

From Booklist:

Poet and novelist Hogan brings her feeling for language and story to these quietly beautiful and provocative musings on the nature of nature. A Chickasaw, Hogan is deeply involved with trying to relearn the "tribal knowings of thousands of years," revelations about the mysteries of life we've devalued, then forgotten. Hogan does succeed in tapping into some forgotten wisdom in her essays, which, though concise, cover and transcend a great deal of territory. Some relate personal experiences, such as participating in a sweat lodge ceremony or observing snakes, eagles, bats, wolves, flamingos, fish, and termites; and other essays focus on the implications of scientific endeavors, such as teaching chimpanzees sign language or the curious coupling of technology and hope inherent in the Voyager's Interstellar Record, that sound and photo album from Earth for the universe. Hogan writes again and again of the "circular infinity" of life and death, of how air, earth, and water commingle and transform each other, how flowers bloom even in a place as blasted as Hiroshima. The earth has a much stronger will than we do, Hogan tells us, a truth we should acknowledge and respect. Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0393322475
• ISBN 13: 9780393322477
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160