I just discovered Barry Lopez (1945-2020). Author of six novels and the National Book Award (once a winner, the second as a finalist) as a naturalist. My bad.
I'm reading his Arctic Dreams (1986)- thanks to Thrift Books algorithm - having recently read This Cold Heaven by Gretel Ehrlich.
But it's not enough to say in a cursory way that his writing is lyrical. So here is an excerpt:
If we are to devise an enlightened plan for human activity in the Arctic, we needa ore particularized understanding of the land itself - not a more refined mathematical knowledge but a deeper understanding of its nature, as if it were, itself, another sort of civilization we had to reach some agreement with. I would draw you, therefore, back to the concrete dimensions of the land and to what they precipitate; simply to walk across the tundra; to watch the wind stirring a little in the leaves of dwarf birch and willows; to hear the hoof-clacket of migrating caribou. Imagine your ear against the loom of a kayak paddle in the Beaufort Sea, hearing the long, quivering tremolo voice of the bearded seal. Or feeling the surgical sharpness of an Eskimo's obsidian tool under the stroke of your finger.
- GWC
Barry Lopez, a lyrical writer who steeped himself in Arctic wildernesses, the habitats of wolves and exotic landscapes around the world for award-winning books that explored the kinship of nature and human culture, died on Friday at his home in Eugene, Ore. He was 75.
His wife, Debra Gwartney, confirmed his death and said that Mr. Lopez had had prostate cancer. She said the family had been living in a temporary home in Eugene since September, after their longtime home along the McKenzie River, near Finn Rock, Ore., was consumed by a wildfire.
In a half-century of travel to 80 countries that generated nearly a score of nonfiction and fiction works, including volumes of essays and short stories, Mr. Lopez embraced landscapes and literature with humanitarian, environmental and spiritual sensibilities that some critics likened to those of Thoreau and John Muir.
He won the National Book Award (nonfiction) for “Arctic Dreams” (1986), a treatise on his five years with Inuit people and solitude in a land of bitter cold and endless expanses. There he found that howling storms could craft mirages — a hunter stalking a grizzly bear that, as he approaches, turns into a marmot, or a polar bear that grows wings and flies away: only a snowy owl.
