Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day
Search in google:
A celebrated storyteller-poet-naturalist explores a year of dawns in her most personal book to date.The Barnes & Noble ReviewShort of all those thanatosomniphobiacs out there -- the folks who fear dying in their sleep -- few hail the dawn with as much gratitude as Diane Ackerman. In the gathering light, her senses are alert and receptive to a parade of glories: mind-bending colors in the sky, the smell of a lover s skin, the ruckus of birdsong, the morning glory itself -- not the flower (though that too), but a meteorological event: long rolling clouds, rushing forward while spinning backward, a nursery for thunderstorms and awe. She is also happy to have made it through another patch of dangerous darkness, and we nod in agreement, remembering how vulnerable we feel, how our skin crawls, when night is truly pitch black. Our reptilian core has not surrendered its dread of night, even in these light-polluted times. "It s as survivors that we greet each day," she writes in this collection of luxurious, whither-where-I-wander meditations on the break of day. Then again, dawn is the time of duels and the clash of armies, when predators do their best work. Beauty, danger, sensuality -- just Ackerman s cup of tea.
Prologue: A Dawning PleasureDawn Mother 1Spring: Palm Beach, FloridaDawn Among the Palms 9Just a Little Rain 17A Calamity of Cranes 21The Lost Night Sky 30Forget Bats 34Some Tales We Tell 40Venus Observed 45In the Spirit of Monet 49Festivals of the Dawn 56Troubadours 63Missive 71Red Dawns and Fields of Green 76Time Races Dawn's Many Faces 83Summer: Ithaca, New YorkDangerous Dawn 95In the Spirit of Sei Shonagon 99Dawn in the Garden of Cosmic Reflection 107Matins with the Neighbors (Two-Legged and Four) 113The Solstice Bird 120In the Spirit of Hokusai 124On the Ledge of the Morning 128Dew Drop In 132Where It's Summer 140Woodpecker Dawn 144Glory Days 148AutumnThe Murmuring of Innumerable Bees 155Honeycombing 159An Angle on Archimedes 164A Little Sabbath with the Sun 168Autumn Dawn 171False Dawn 174Nothing Doing 176In the Vase of the Universe 180Clever as Clever 188Field Guides 195WinterWhere It's Winter 203Water, Water Everywhere 209Crystals 215One Bad Rooster Spoils the Barnyard 219After Hours 225The Silence That Is Not There and the Silence That Is 232Time Well Spent 236Acknowledgments 241
