An exploration of what constitutes the "poetic" in landscape painting today.t examines ways for artists in all mediums to express the poetic in theirainting. According to Elizabeth Mowry, a master of the poetic landscapeenre, a key element of his genre is evoking an emotional response in theiewer, which is achieved by the artist's arrangement of natural elements aseeply expressed through his or her imagination, intellect and feelings. Theaintings that grace these pages are all visual illustrations of the book'soncept of the poetic landscape. Paintings are examined through the specificoncerns for achieving the special sense of time and place found in theseandscapes such as colour, time of day, time of year, atmosphere and weather;s well as capturing the more illusive qualities that define this genre, suchs a sense of place recognition, leading and letting go, and grace of line.

Using the poet's native Italian landscapes, Gilbert Highet recreates these poets in situ to evoke the essence of their work. His translations summon a land enchanted by presences - from Horace's beloved Tivoli to Ovid in the Abruzzi. Highet lets each poet tell his own story - their pleasures and agonies, passions and hates and above all their devotion to the natural world around them.

Canada: A Poetic Landscape is a well-considered, joy-filled journey into the vast splendour of the Canadian landscape, its history and heritage, crafted through the lens of an artist turned poet. Experience every province and territory, the book imparts lesser-known information about Canada through colourful, detailed, and whimsical paintings alongside culturally themed stories expressed in verse. From totem poles and inukshuks to the fur trade and the gold rush, from cottage country and maple syrup to high tides and sculptured rocks, from a long history of war to the land cradled on the waves, this book is rich with the uniqueness of each province and territory. Canada: A Poetic Landscape offers an alternative or addition to the map-colouring and memorization of provinces taught in most schools, and provides a more comprehensive understanding of geography and history. Written primarily for children aged ten years and older, this book will inspire readers, young and old, to want to learn more about and experience more of Canada.

In 1994, workers broke ground on China’s Three Gorges Dam. By its completion in 2012, the dam had transformed the ecology of the Yangzi River, displaced over a million people, and forever altered a landscape immortalized in centuries of literature and art. The controversial history of the dam is well known; what this book uncovers are its unexpected connections to the cultural traditions it seems to sever. By reconsidering the dam in relation to the aesthetic history of the Three Gorges region over more than two millennia, Fixing Landscape offers radically new ways of thinking about cultural and spatial production in contemporary China. Corey Byrnes argues that this monumental feat of engineering can only be understood by confronting its status as a techno-poetic act, a form of landscaping indebted to both the technical knowledge of engineers and to the poetic legacies of the Gorges as cultural site. Synthesizing methods drawn from premodern, modern, and contemporary Chinese studies, as well as from critical geography, art history, and the environmental humanities, Byrnes offers innovative readings of eighth-century poetry, paintings from the twelfth through twenty-first centuries, contemporary film, nineteenth-century British travelogues, and Chinese and Western maps, among other sources. Fixing Landscape shows that premodern poetry and visual art have something urgent to tell us about a contemporary experiment in spatial production. Poems and paintings may not build dams, but Byrnes argues that the Three Gorges Dam would not exist as we know it without them.

In this masterful new study of the ancient poetry of the Song of Songs, Elaine T. James explores the Song's underlying interest in the natural world. Engaging with the fields of geography, landscape architecture, and literature, James critiques the tendency of scholars to reify a perceived dichotomy between "nature" and "culture" and instead argues that the poetic attention to landscape indicates an awareness of a viewer. Nature is here a poetic device that informs James's close-readings of agrarianism, gardens, cities, social control, and feminism and the gaze in the Song. With this two-fold emphasis on landscape and lyric, Landscape of the Song of Songs shows how the Song persistently envisions a world in which human lovers are embedded in the natural world, complexly enfolded in relationships of fragility and care.

An astounding novel from Argentina that is a meditation on the beautiful and the grotesque in nature, the art of landscape painting, and one experience in a man's life that became a lightning rod for inspiration. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.