Robert Finch

John Elder

W. W. Norton is pleased to announce that The Norton Book of Nature Writing is now available in a paperback college edition.

The Norton Book of Nature Writing

From acclaimed author and naturalist Robert Finch, a richly detailed observance of Cape Cod's seemingly vanished natural and human past, as it clings to its present landscape. This is a voyage of discovery, a personal odyssey into the nature of a single Cape Cod neighborhood. It is a rich portrait, beautifully drawn, of a landscape and a community whose essential character lies in their penetrating interface with the sea. But it is also an individual quest, a journey of the heart and mind in which the author seeks "entrance, or rather re-entrance" into "that vast living maze stretching out beyond my lines of sight."

The Primal Place

Eighteen essays describe the author's experiences exploring the outer half of Cape Cod, and share his observations on nature, ecology, and the relationship between people and their environment.

Journeys to the Outer Edges of Cape Cod

Outlands

Presents a compilation of prose nature writing containing selections by such authors as Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, Edward Hoagland, Annie Dillard, and Terry Tempest Williams.

The Tradition in English

Nature Writing

A poignant, candid chronicle of a beloved nature writer’s fifty-year relationship with an iconic American landscape. Those who have encountered Cape Cod—or merely dipped into an account of its rich history—know that it is a singular place. Robert Finch writes of its beaches: “No other place I know sears the heart with such a constant juxtaposition of pleasure and pain, of beauty being born and destroyed in the same moment.” And nowhere within its borders is this truth more vivid and dramatic than along the forty miles of Atlantic coast—what Finch has always known as the Outer Beach. The essays here represent nearly fifty years and a cumulative thousand miles of walking along the storied edge of the Cape’s legendary arm. Finch considers evidence of nature’s fury: shipwrecks, beached whales, towering natural edifices, ferocious seaside blizzards. And he ponders everyday human interactions conducted in its environment with equal curiosity, wit, and insight: taking a weeks-old puppy for his first beach walk; engaging in a nocturnal dance with one of the Cape’s fabled lighthouses; stumbling, unexpectedly, upon nude sunbathers; or even encountering out-of-towners hoping an Uber will fetch them from the other side of a remote dune field. Throughout these essays, Finch pays tribute to the Outer Beach’s impressive literary legacy, meditates on its often-tragic history, and explores the strange, mutable nature of time near the ocean. But lurking behind every experience and observation—both pivotal and quotidian—is the essential question that the beach beckons every one of its pilgrims to confront: How do we accept our brief existence here, caught between overwhelming beauty and merciless indifference? Finch’s affable voice, attentive eye, and stirring prose will be cherished by the Cape’s staunch lifers and erstwhile visitors alike, and strike a resounding chord with anyone who has been left breathless by the majestic, unrelenting beauty of the shore.

The Outer Beach: A Thousand-Mile Walk on Cape Cod's Atlantic Shore

Silverthorn Bush and Other Poems

It has long been the custom to condemn eighteenth-century French poetry outright as generally unworthy of attention. However, in keeping with a recent change of attitude towards this vast and diverse body of literature, Professor Finch here undertakes to isolate a certain group of poets, belonging to the first half of the century, who may appropriately be called individualistes and who are in various ways characteristic of a definite and important trend of their time. The authors he has chosen were selected from the larger group of individualists because each provides, in addition to his poems, a complete statement of his own conception of poetry and of that conception which is common to the group as a whole. Since the works treated are comparatively unfamiliar the author has considered them from a historical and an analytical as well as a critical point of view. In addition he has devoted three special chapters to a literary historian (Evrard Titon du Tillet) and to three critical theorists (Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Yves-Marie André, and Charles Batteux) whose contemporary writings, while they may or may not have influenced the poets here examined, support, reflect, or confirm their ideas and practice. Texts of these poets are not easily available and the numerous representative quotations from the poems given in this book will be welcomed by the reader.

Robert Finch

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