First, two volumes intended for the coffee table, well worth examining in detail. The West of the Imagination by William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann (Oklahoma, 604 pp., $65)–one William Goetzmann is a distinguished historian of the west at the University of Texas, the other W.G. a professor of finance at the Yale School of Management–is a revision of the initial volume that served as a companion to the PBS series two decades ago. This new, second edition is not just revised but expanded and updated, and about as comprehensive as it is possible to be about an expansive subject.
You could argue that the growth of the American republic has been as much about its westward movement as its internal improvements or constitutional development. And from the curiosities that Lewis and Clark carried back to their patron, Thomas Jefferson, through the luminous paintings of George Catlin and Albert Bierstadt, to the cinema retrospectives of the old frontier, the American imagination has been continually inflamed by the idea of the west. This is not just an extraordinary visual encyclopedia, but a quick and comprehensive introduction to America west of the Mississippi.
By contrast, The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism & Architecture in Colonial South Carolina by Louis P. Nelson (North Carolina, 516 pp., $50), returns us to the 13 colonies with a fascinating, richly illustrated exploration of the history of the Church of England in 17th- and 18th-century South Carolina through church architecture, objects, and artifacts. Unlike Virginia, which was founded as an Anglican preserve, South Carolina had an attitude toward the Established Church that was considerably more complex, and ambivalent, and evolved as Anglicanism was transformed from the time of Charles I through the late Enlightenment.
This is a new volume in the Richard Hampton Jenrette Series in Architecture and the Decorative Arts, and the author, chairman of the architectural history department at the University of Virginia, provides an extraordinary, richly textured, and beautifully illustrated guide to the lost world of pre-independence South Carolina–and the vestiges of rural and urban church habits and practices that still obtain in the contemporary South. You need hardly be an Episcopalian, or connoisseur of the decorative arts, to savor this volume: Any student of American history, or the history of American religion, will consider it essential reading.
The appeal of Capybara: A Natural History of the World’s Largest Rodent by Rexford D. Lord (Johns Hopkins, 200 pp., $50) speaks for itself: It would be difficult to find any casual reader who isn’t beguiled by the lore and spectacle of these hundred-pound cousins of the guinea pig who roam the tropical wetlands of South America.
The capybara, looking wise and self-contained as he lurks on the plains or gambols in the water, has been losing numbers and his natural habitat to farming and poaching; but as anyone who has ever observed one at close range can attest, capybaras adapt comfortably and easily to human contact, and play an increasing role, as food and fodder, in the Latin agricultural economy.
This is an old-fashioned book of natural history, a thorough description of the capybara’s physiology, behavior, and taxonomy, its appeal to tourists, its status in the food chain, and its varying habits and moods, whether individually or in groups. A capybara, once seen, is not soon forgotten, and there are dozens of delightful photographs to complement the technical data.
John Felstiner is a distinguished professor of English at Stanford, student of Max Beerbohm, modern Jewish literature, poets Paul Celan and Pablo Neruda, and the pioneering academic study of literature and ecology. Now, in Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems (Yale, 440 pp., $35), he has brought together 40 disparate essays–a handful of which first appeared, in slightly different form, in these pages–on poets whose attention to the details of nature, and the relation of man to his physical environment, was especially acute.
Since antiquity, poets have been alive to the natural world, and have always comprehended the spiritual, as well as physical, dimensions of man’s surroundings. But as Felstiner explains, we are living in an age of environmental crisis–or perhaps more accurately, environmental consciousness–and it is possible that, while poets are not likely to “save the earth,” they certainly awaken us to the earth’s delights and, by inference, point us toward responsible stewardship as well.
Felstiner’s great gift is not polemical but descriptive: Poets as different as John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robinson Jeffers have celebrated their surroundings in their various ways; but with Felstiner’s expert guidance, the reader’s ear grows more acute, and eye considerably sharper, as the telling details and pertinent word-play are explained. Can Poetry Save the Earth? also features illustrations–from Jeffers’s hard Tor House to Yeats’s luminous lapis lazuli to Derek Walcott’s crashing ocean breakers–that cannot substitute for words but furnish a second dimension to their meaning. This is a remarkable volume that tells us something about poetry, and a lot about the earth–no small achievement.
Philip Terzian is literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
