Kirjahaku

“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…” —Charles Darwin, The Origin of SpeciesRobert Michael Pyle’s popular “Tangled Bank” column appeared in fifty-two consecutive issues of Orion and Orion Afield magazines over eleven years. Each essay collected in The Tangled Bank explores Charles Darwin’s contention that the elements of such a bank, and by extension all the living world, are endlessly interesting and ever evolving.Pyle’s thoughtful and concise narratives range in subject from hops and those who love them to independent bookstores to the monarchs of Mexico. In each piece, Pyle refutes “the idea that the world is a boring place,” sharing his meticulous observations of the endless and fascinating details of the living earth.

By an early age, Robert Michael Pyle discovered that he had a greater facility with words than with numbers. In high school, he found he could get good grades and win essay contests by relying on words alone. But he wasn’t really moved to write until a powerful experience in the summer of 1965 brought his pen together with his passion for the natural world, and he wrote his first heartfelt essay.That essay began a life path devoted to natural history, nature conservation, and language—and how they all meet in the literature of the land. Working in a succession of far-flung jobs in biological conservation, teaching, and field research, Pyle eventually gave up a regular paycheck in favor of a freelance existence devoted to his mutual passions for nature study and writing. All along, he wrote, and wrote. To date, he has written twenty books and hundreds of essays, stories, papers, and poems. But it is the occasional prose—the deeply personal essays that explored and indulged his immediate fascinations—that make up this selection of never-before-collected testimonies.Arranged by decade, Through a Green Lens presents a sampling of Pyle’s work over fifty years, from that first heartfelt essay, written on mountain motel stationery in 1965, to a book foreword written in 2015. Culled from notable magazines and contributions to edited collections, these essays range across broad topical, geographic, and textual territory. They grow out of near-lethal English brambles, vacant lots and ditches in suburban Denver, and railroad yards of the industrial Northeast.From commentary to criticism, polemic to profile—from the lyrical to the elegiac—Through a Green Lens demonstrates the qualities for which Pyle’s work is well-known: clarity, readability, sharp wit, undiluted conviction, and good-natured tolerance. Pyle’s half-century-long view, acute and uncommonly attuned to the physical world, gives readers a remarkable window on the natural setting of our life and times.

Robert Michael Pyle’s voice is an essential element in the culture of our literary and scientific community. His deep knowledge of the ecology of the earth and the life patterns of a wide variety of living forms, his careful attention to detail, his passion and energy and commitment to humanity that appear in his past work are present in abundance throughout the poetry in Evolution of the Genus Iris. We are fortunate readers indeed to have this new book and its poems abroad in the world.

Chinook and Chanterelle is Robert Michael Pyle's second full-length book of poetry. Rich in natural images, stories, and indelible episodes from the whole world around us, Pyle's poems also track the territory of loss and grief as it rises onto the higher ground of rediscovery, redemption, and re-enchantment. They exalt the ordinary even as they find the extraordinary in physical details that we too often look right through.

"Teaches us how to be the best kind of human beings." --ECLECTICAAs a boy in Colorado, Robert Michael Pyle fell in love with alpine heights and the butterflies that float above the tree line. This early passion sparked a career in conservation that took Pyle across the globe--until he realized that he was no longer as intimate with the natural world that first spurred him to action.Walking the High Ridge is a journey through Pyle's "unruly pack of interests"--biology, nature conservation, and literature--to his decision finally to choose the life that would give free reign to his scientific and creative impulses and keep him "as much as possible, out of doors."

The inspiration for the film The Dark Divide starring David Cross and Debra Messing, one of America's most esteemed natural history writers takes to the hills in search of Bigfoot-and finds the wildness within ourselves.Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to investigate the legends of Sasquatch, Yale-trained ecologist Dr. Robert Pyle treks into the unprotected wilderness of the Dark Divide near Mount St. Helens, where he discovers both a giant fossil footprint and recent tracks. On the trail of what he thought was legend, he searches out Indians who tell him of an outcast tribe, the Seeahtiks, who had not fully evolved into humans. A handful of open-minded biologists and anthropologists counter the tabloids Pyle studies, while rogue Forest Service employees and loggers swear of a vast conspiracy to deep-six true stories of unknown, upright hominoid apes among us. He attends Sasquatch Daze, where he meets scientists, hunters, and others who have devoted their lives to the search, only to realize that "these guys don't want to find Bigfoot they want to be Bigfoot!"Since its original publication, the author's fresh experiences and finds have been added to his original work through an updated chapter. With an evaluation of recent DNA evidence from Bigfoot hair and scat, the study of speech phonemes in the "Sierra Sounds" purported Bigfoot recordings, an examination of the impact of the wildly popular Animal Planet series Bigfoot Hunters, the reemergence of the famous Bob Gimlin into the Bigfoot community, and more, Walking With Bigfoot keeps every Bigfoot enthusiast's mind wide open to one of the biggest questions in the land and brings Pyle's work on the "legend" of Bigfoot into the new century.

A rich and rollicking first novel from one of America's most beloved and widely acclaimed nature writers, Robert Michael Pyle In Magdalena Mountain, Robert Michael Pyle's first and long-awaited novel, the award-winning naturalist proves he is as at home in an imagined landscape as he is in the natural one. At the center of this story of majesty and high mountain magic are three Magdalenas--Mary, a woman whose uncertain journey opens the book; Magdalena Mountain, shrouded in mystery and menace; and the all-black Magdalena alpine butterfly, the most elusive of several rare and beautiful species found on the mountain. And high in the Colorado Rocky Mountain wilderness, sharing the remote territory of the Erebia magdalena butterfly, lives the enigmatic Oberon, a reluctant de facto leader of the Grove, a diverse community of monks who share a devotion to Nature. Converging in the same wilderness are October Carson, a beachcomber-wanderer in pursuit of the alpine butterflies he collects for museums; James Mead, a young graduate student intent upon learning the ecology of this seductive creature; and the enigmatic Mary Glanville, who also seeks the butterfly but can't remember why. While the mystery surrounding Mary takes a menacing turn, their shared quest pulls them deeper into the high mountain wilderness culminating in a harrowing encounter on the stony slopes of Magdalena Mountain.

Robert Michael Pyle's fifth full-length compilation, The Last Man in Willapa, contains more than seventy-five poems, most of which are entirely new since his previous collection (The Tidewater Reach, 2018).Within these pages, readers can find people, creatures, places, and stochastic happenings both large and small. Pyle's longtime followers will recognize poems that are lyrical, story-based, and descriptive, usually featuring species, selves, and lifeways other than his own, but derived from his personal experience. Pyle writes from the details of the real, physical world, where nothing is beneath notice.A few of the book's sections orbit specific subjects. "The Cuba Poems" came from a week in Havana with other writers, Cuban and American, and Pyle's run-ins with the nature of the place. "The Children of the Night" began with a dream that drew forth memories from childhood with his brother and others. "From the River" pays homage to the Pacific Northwest where he lives and writes. Often witty and with an eye to the upside in spite of the facts, Pyle's are poems in which every story paints a picture, grace is seldom withheld, and love is never far behind.