Reading the Mountains of Home

Small farms once occupied the heights that John Elder calls home, but now only a few cellar holes and tumbled stone walls remain among the dense stands of maple, beech, and hemlocks on these Vermont hills. Reading the Mountains of Homeis a journey into these verdant reaches where in the last century humans tried their hand and where bear and moose now find shelter. As John Elder is our guide, so Robert Frost is Elder's companion, his great poem "Directive" seeing us through a landscape in which nature and literature, loss and recovery, are inextricably joined.Over the course of a year, Elder takes us on his hikes through the forested uplands between South Mountain and North Mountain, reflecting on the forces of nature, from the descent of the glaciers to the rush of the New Haven River, that shaped a plateau for his village of Bristol; and on the human will that denuded and farmed and abandoned the mountains so many years ago. His forays wind through the flinty relics of nineteenth-century homesteads and Abenaki settlements, leading to meditations on both human failure and the possibility for deeper communion with the land and others.An exploration of the body and soul of a place, an interpretive map of its natural and literary life, Reading the Mountains of Home strikes a moving balance between the pressures of civilization and the attraction of wilderness. It is a beautiful work of nature writing in which human nature finds its place, where the reader is invited to follow the last line of Frost's "Directive," to "Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."

Starting with a few lines of Frost's poem on the human and natural histories of this enclave, each chapter examines the exquisite detail of nearby nature in conjunction with close analysis of Frost's expansive meanings...Readers may question whether this is primarily a book of literary criticism, environmental appreciation or simply a minute vivisection of a poem, but in the end Elder persuades us of the vastly encompassing theme Frost addressed and the eventual self-discovery of being lost in this land. Elder has written a tour de force of insight and interpretive skill., It is deeply personal and profoundly moving--and an eloquent challenge to some of the principal assumptions that guide the environmental movement in this country. Reading the Mountains of Home may be at once one of the more accessible yet complex nature books ever published. It is accessible because Elder is an immensely gifted writer, whether he's describing the way a glacier halved a mountain 20,000 years ago or explaining why, in his opinion, Frost was one of New England's great naturalists. It is complex because the book has three distinct threads: First, there is a nature writer's scrutiny of the world; second, there is an English professor's precise discussion of literature and one long Frost poem; and, third, there is one man's self-examination at midlife...Though John Elder's book is suffused with loss...[it] is uplifting. In part, this is due to Elder's contention that man and nature are not incompatible and that wilderness may be renewable after all. But it is due also to Elder himself: It is not hard for Elder to find beauty and pleasure in the world, and this comes across on almost every page., [This] is the most intelligent book about Vermont that I've read in several years. New Vermont books often fall into a very few predictable categories...John Elder's book, Reading the Mountains of Home, fits into none of those categories. It transcends them all, brilliantly, and emerges as that rare find: a new and fascinating look at this complex place we call home...A book of considerable subtlety and complexity that reads easily and spins a story as compelling as any good novel. But that's only one of [its] accomplishments. For what Elder has also done here, I believe, is the very important task of pointing a new, coherent direction for the national environmental movement, a movement now struggling with an outmoded script, and very much in need of revitalization...Perhaps the best description of Reading the Mountains of Home is to call it an exploration--a deep exploration of what a particular place can mean to a particular human being--and thereby to all of us. It's a book I hope every Vermonter will read., John Elder turned to Frost's last great poem and has written a beautiful study of its complicated narrative...More than literary criticism, Reading the Mountains of Home is an extended homage, a memoir and meditation. Elder succeeds in the most difficult of ways: As his focus expands, his concentration grows more acute...His analysis is attuned to both the language of the poem and to its concentric rings, the stories that illuminate this landscape and prove the vitality and relevance of poetry., John Elder has plumbed deeply the wisdom of the likes of Parker and Frost, examining with the skill of both a poet and a naturalist the history of the modern Vermont landscape...[He] has written a book that manages at once to blend precise nature writing, profound literary criticism, and a moving examination of his own personal world at midlife...Reading the Mountains of Home is a truly rare joy: It is a book that will not merely help a reader to navigate the world in the woods; it will also help one to understand that all too complex geography of the human soul.

John Elder is Stewart Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and the author of Following the Brush: An American Encounter with Classical Japanese Culture and Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature.