On foot and in a leaky canoe, award-winning poet and naturalist Thorpe Moeckel meanders for a year through the fragmented forests of the Eno and Haw watersheds. He seeks the alive interiors of a world covered over in asphalt, seeks to shed its hard exterior and "wonder the woods." In doing so he makes a record both physical and numinous. His writing--lyrical and leapy with cellular, porous perceptiveness--invites readers to journey with him around every surprising bend and twisting turn of phrase.
Reading this book is like trying to grasp a live fish or to study the seeds of a jewelweed pod the moment they unfurl: joyful, exhilarating, wakeful, wise, and riddled with each moment's loss. It orients by disorienting, because how else, Moeckel asks, can being in such an altered, changing, resilient place feel.
Here are upwellings from the interior Piedmont. Here is an eco-psychological lingua terra, an Anthropocene pilgrimage, a chronicle of presence, and presence's peregrinations. Here, most of all, is an experience in attention to place, the events of the seasonal, day-to-day flora and fauna of the Carolina Piedmont. Here we reside in the space where one thought has ended and another has not yet begun, where one way of life has ended and another is still being dreamed.
Those who love good writing and/or nature will love Thorpe Moeckel's exploration in this Wonder Almanac.