The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Nonpareil Book, 78): 10 (Nonpareil Books, 10)

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An exquisite, lovingly crafted meditation on plants, trees, and our place in the natural world, in the tradition of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek . He complained in letters of the stupidity of his students, and he sighed to an interviewer, “I was getting students who had read nothing, knew nothing, and thought the university existed for the sake of the Kentucky Wildcats. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

It is not hard to understand why Davenport has only 13 readers, but it is also not hard to understand why they are so ardent. Davenport published over 40 books, among them collections of short stories, translations from the Greek, illustrated works, a novel, and critical studies on literature, culture, and art. Kate Colby's sixth book is a personal ars poetica that looks back on her previous work and asks what she meant to say, what she keeps meaning to, and how to mean more. To have closed the gap between mythology and botany is but one movement of the process; one way to read The Cantos is to go through noting the restorations of relationships now thought to be discrete—the ideogrammatic method was invented for just this purpose. This is the sort of book that celebrates humanism and leaves the reader breathless, as if having attended a reception where everybody who was anybody from Homer and all his characters to Wittgenstein and beyond has been present and asked you some probing question.

We new-world settlers, then, brought the imagination of other countries to transplant it in a different geography. But if he could be imperiously intellectual, he also went in for experimental fiction and wistful remembrances of childhood excursions, for dreamlike drawings and clever puns. The early interpreters of The Cantos tended to see the poem as a study of the man of willed and directed action, as a persona of Odysseus. Both poems were printed there in their stages of creation - one a work of now recognised genius, the other to receive only a crumb of attention, as both were subsequently printed together in a newspaper and now perhaps again here, in this essay.

Not only had Davenport seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything in print, he also had the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to draw connections between how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization.Cultus becomes our word culture, not in the portentous sense it now has, but in a much humbler sense. Like their author, who translated the Greeks as he munched fried bologna, they refuse the constraints of classification, preferring to remain marvelously and lavishly multiple. Even more, you stand in awe of the connections he can make between the archaic and the modern; he makes the remote familiar and the familiar fundamental.