A Luminous Uplift, Landscape & Memory

A Luminous Uplift is a rich compendium of John Brandi's new and selected prose spanning four decades of investigative travels through the American Southwest to the far reaches of the Himalaya. John Brandi's selection of writings over the last four decades opens with a memoir addressing his awakening to landscape and poetry during his upbringing in California, his counterculture years in the Sixties, his Peace Corps work with indigenous farmers in the Andes, his eye-opening travels in India. Two sections of travel essays follow. The first is focused on his multiple visits to India, Sikkim and Nepal, with vivid descriptions of Khajuraho's erotic temples, the ritual dances of Kerala, the monasteries of the Himalaya, his discovery of Ghalib's poetry, his reflections on Baudelaire while lost in the crowds of Mumbai. Section two is focused on life and travel in the American Southwest: the sky villages of Hopi, the Deer Dance of Taos, walkabouts with Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki, his practice of haiku at home in the New Mexico mesa lands. The book closes with the author's celebratory essay on where, exactly, the journey began that led him to New Mexico. On John Brandi's writings, poet Arthur Sze comments: "They are a form of language on landscape, a form of inscape, that, intimate and moving, are also arresting and revelatory."