Desert Poems

The first collection of original poetry by the renowned nature writer and highly lauded translator of the Chinese classics. Traveling today I found a river somewhere inside me, wondered how far it wanders there and how much sky it mirrors. All day long, wind and desert light, I followed that river’s distances . . . Weaving mind and landscape together in meditations on sky and wind, ridgeline and horizon, existence and self, Desert marks David Hinton’s first collection of original poetry in over a decade. Hinton’s poetic art has long shined brilliantly through his widely acclaimed Chinese translations—and here speaks for itself in his contemporary voice as he turns his attention to the transcendent landscape of the American West. Updating the philosophical insights of ancient China that Hinton has explored so deeply, these poems bring the wonder and ancient mystery of the desert landscape to light. Hinton demonstrated in The Wilds of Poetry how those ancient Chinese insights shaped the innovative American poetry of our time, and here he extends that tradition in poems that are spare and spacious, as vast and open as the desert itself.