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Songs of the Seasons: Birds, Beasts, Tides, and Time in the Maine Woods To pay by check please use this order form. We are pleased to take orders from retailers. Email us with details about your order or call us at 207-837-5760. Songs of the Seasons: Birds, Beasts, Tides, and Time in the Maine Woods is Maine author Dana Wilde's latest collection of essays on topics both micro (starflowers and spiders) and macro (eclipses, climate change, and Cassiopeia). As a former newspaper editor and columnist, Wilde brings his reporting instincts to bear from the backyard to the universe. These brief, eminently accessible essays have the humor of the newsroom, the curiosity of a scientist, and the heart of a humanist. And more than just nature observations, the spirit of his recently lost wife, Bonnie, abides throughout the collection. Big and small ideas unfolded from the familiarities of the backyard. NATURE / Essays ISBN: 978-1-971191-33-1 (print; softcover; perfect bound) LCCN: 2026950942 Released November 10, 2026 | Copyright 2026 236 pages |
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“Dana Wilde has a scientist's curiosity and a poet's imagination. I can think of no other writer who would describe our galaxy as being ‘just a blur, like a wisp of spit in a lake.’ This man has star marrow in his bones. Pay attention.” “This collection of Dana Wilde's careful observations of the Maine flora and fauna are not just a tourist's snapshots. Each meditation, always understated and objective, crackles with his unique sensibility, one that appreciates—and teaches us to appreciate—the subtle gradations in the landscape over time. And not just the landscape, but also the presence there of the ancestors—literary and scientific, ecological and historical—and the greater meteorological and metaphysical implications of our lives here and now.” “The naturalist, says Emerson, must satisfy all the demands of the spirit. Dana Wilde does that by uniquely unifying acute perception with that transcendental metaphysic that Emerson unabashedly called Love. Wilde is the poet of facts, his science always in the service of reverence and his universal intimations of spirit never ‘the easy gold of fay or elf,’ as Robert Frost praised a practice of the natural supernatural. Wilde is not an excursionist, but a seer who observes the comprehensive, year-round fluidity of nature surrounding him and the eternal cosmos above him from his backyard in Troy, Maine. He is the best of the real thing, letting the obdurate bleakness and the rampant beauty of Maine inform each other in wit that is invariably wise and intimate. Every essay in this book can teach us like parables of understanding and reason how to unite devotion and thought to be whole people in our waking lives.” “Dana Wilde’s writing, reached for regularly, will see one through any kind of winter or wait, noting, as it does, evidence and promise of what it will reward us to remember about living here through the seasons. Their sensory shocks, delights and divinities if we but consult what is known, like Wilde’s essays, and each other, and notice up.” “I started reading this book yesterday afternoon, and again this morning. Beautiful stuff. I literally struggled to put it down—just one more, and one more . . . ” “Such breadth coupled with such precision, so multi-layered, and so true to human experience, yet humbly true without the affectation and sense of importance that afflicts so much contemporary ‘nature’ and ‘spiritual’ writing. It's Buddhist teisho, earth science, cosmology, neighborly gossip, grave warning, jokes—all in a prose package that penetrates like poetry. I'm a fan of Dana Wilde’s writing partly because, as the Quakers say, the writing ‘speaks to my condition.’ I won't see goldenrod the same way anymore. Or the sky. Or my yard. |
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News and Reviews Beth McEvoy, “There are spiders everywhere. There is probably a spider within three feet of you,” NEWS CENTER MAINE (November 12, 2020) |
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