Unsolaced Along the Way to All That Is

In The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich announced her aspiration as a writer to assign the physical qualities of the earth--weather, light and wind--to our contemporary age. In Unsolaced, thirty-five years later, Ehrlich shows us how these forces have shaped her experience and her understanding as she recalls the split-end strands of friendships spliced to new loves, houses built and lived in, conversations that shifted outlooks, as she tries to catch a glimpse of herself and the places she has sought as an anchor for her spirit. Ehrlich's quest is not for the comfort of permanence, but for transience, the need to be unsettled--to find stillness in the disquiet of engagement, to find in the landscapes of earth, ice, climate, genetic mayhem, and shifting canvas of memory--the possibility of longing.
Ehrlich's voice is a unique amalgam of poetry and science, her attention held fast by the vegetation and animals she cares for, the lyric exaltation of insight that gives both her and her readers an intimation of a greater whole.

Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets, this stunning collection of memories, observations, and narratives is acute and lyrical, Whitmanesque in dadth, and as elegant as a Japanese tea house. "Sentience and sunderance," she writes. "How we know what we know, how we lose it all." As if to stave off impending loss, she embarks on strenuous adventures to Greenland, Africa, Kosovo, Japan and an uninhabited Alaskan Island, always returning to her simple Wyoming cabin at the foot of the mountains and the trail that leads into the heart of them.