From firewatcher/poet comes a powerfully meditative with a basis in Japanese poetic form Haibun; comps are Peter Matthiesen's Snow Leopard and The Nine-Headed Dragon River, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, and even Norman MacLean's Young Men and Fire. Multi-award-winning writer Philip Connors had been a fire watcher in the Gila Wilderness for fourteen straight summers when he sustained an injury and was forced to miss a year recovering. When he returned, he resolved to see the mountain with fresh eyes and to keep a detailed notebook. The result is The Mountain Knows the Mountain, a meticulously observed experience of one fire season chronicled in haibun, the centuries-old prose form dating from Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior that recounts both inner and outer journeys and incorporates traditional haiku as an occasional element of narrative counterpoint. Though only a beginner in the practice of haiku, Connors deftly weaves close observation, personal reflection, and memory with hard-won knowledge of the forest, of the mountain, and of fire. The Mountain Knows the Mountain is both mythic and immediate, a chronicle of daily events granular in their specificity but connected to larger themes of the observed world and the inner life of the observer. Connors captures the various moods of a long season on a mountain; plays with language and ways of seeing; and includes contributing perspectives from his partner, Monica Ortiz Uribe, and his friend the late editor and publisher Bobby Byrd. Together with the author's own simple drawings, the resulting snapshots offer incisive visions of how to be intimate with the wild.
Philip Connors has been a fire watcher in New Mexico's Gila Wilderness for twenty-three years. He is the author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, which won the 2011 National Outdoor Book Award. He is also the author of All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found and A Song for the River. He lives in southern New Mexico.
"The Mountain Knows the Mountain is the finest example I've ever read that reveals what it is to 'think like a mountain, ' a notion forwarded by Aldo Leopold and perfected by Phil Connors. His book is a perfect meld of prose and poetry (mostly haiku) that is an expression of profound love for a mountain habitat where he has long served as a fire lookout. This elegiac book re-sacralizes a habitat long fallen prey to debilitating bureaucracy that secularizes the natural world through commitment to erroneous, often fatal procedure."--Jack Loeffler, author of Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West "Find in these pages profound beauty, deep comfort, and vexing disquiet. Ask yourself some of the questions Connors keeps asking. Then walk out of the house to some perfect, inscrutable run of nature and fall in love."--Gary Ferguson, author of The Eight Master Lessons of Nature: What Nature Teaches Us About Living Well in the World "Pick up The Mountain Knows the Mountain, and you will sit with Connors atop his fire lookout in the Gila Wilderness, scanning the horizon for wisps of smoke. You will also listen to Connors speak about the moving of the summer season, the writing of haiku, those fires smoldering below, the state of American wilderness and our American dream, all in beautiful prose and poetry."--Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave
