Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. OLD TALE ROAD, Andrew Schelling's first full collection of poetry in six years, is a visionary work of crisply detailed language and wide-ranging content. It balances the ecological, mythic, and personal realms, while carrying the flavor of American ballads or blues. There are poems in haibun form, lyric songs, linked-verse, and a Noh play. The personae of OLD TALE ROAD include friends, ghosts, lovers, Buddhist monks, dead poets, mountain spirits, and the strangely named animals of the American West. "Andrew Schelling is the latest incarnation in an American poetic lineage that began with the Transcendentalists and moved west with Rexroth and Snyder: the unlikely and fortuitous conjunction of wilderness expertise, the observational precision of a natural historian, homegrown radical politics, and an immersion in Asian philosophy and writing"--Eliot Weinberger.
About the Author
Andrew Schelling is the author or editor of fifteen books and numerous chapbooks. He is the preeminent translator into English of India's early poetry, most of which is secular, erotic, and grounded in close observation of the natural world. His first book of translations, Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India, has just been released from White Pine Press in a revised edition. When it first came out in 1991 it received the Academy of American Poets translation award. He teaches poetry and Sanskrit at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He is also a founding arts faculty at Deer Park Institute in Himachal Pradesh, India.