A Luminous Uplift, Landscape & Memory

“They are a form of language on landscape, a form of inscape, that, intimate and moving, are also arresting and revelatory.”— Arthur Sze 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 his awakening to landscape and poetry during his upbringing in California, his counterculture years in the Sixties, and his Peace Corps work with indigenous farmers in the Andes. Essays 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, move from the physical landscape to the literary, with his discovery of Ghalib’s poetry and his reflections on Baudelaire while lost in the crowds of Mumbai. Brandi roves in these pages from the sky villages of Hopi, the Deer Dance of Taos, walkabouts with Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki, to his practice of haiku in the New Mexico mesa lands he has made his home.