Ascendance - by Tim McNulty (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Award-winning Northwest poet and nature writer, Tim McNulty's third poetry collection explores the universal themes of family, friendship, work, and solitude, all within the larger context of the natural world. For McNulty that world embraces the mountains, rivers, forests, and coastlines of the Pacific Northwest where he has made his home for more than four decades. McNulty's clear voice and attentive eye bring the people, landscapes, and creatures that inhabit these poems vividly to life.

Review Quotes

These poems ... are a path into the humane wildness of this accomplished family man, forestry worker, naturalist, scholar, homesteader, and Pacific traveler. Ascendance is above all an image of the salmon heading back upstream, and the cycle of fertility. A wise, lively, lovely book.

-Gary Snyder

Spanning several decades, this diverse collection of poems ... ranges widely in tone and scope, from humorous poems for his daughter Caitlin to complex poems chronicling the removal of the Elwha River dams. Throughout, the poems are threaded together by McNulty s clear love of place, carefully observed over four decades working, living, exploring, and defending the forests of his home in the shadow of the Olympic Mountains. Reading these meditative poems, we're reminded of the value of close attention and the power of the specific detail, and ... what it means to dwell deeply on our own home ground. -Holly J. Hughes

Tim McNulty is one of those rare poets who not only attends to the world, but to the consequences of being resident in it. This collection contains such attentions, by turns funny, reverent, insightful, and modest. These are poems to keep close to hand and heart. -Samuel Green

Tim McNulty is the author of several volumes of Pacific Northwest natural history, including wonderful incantations on Washington s wild rivers, Mt. Rainier, and the Olympic Peninsula. But McNulty is widely known for his homegrown poetry, too... Ascendance, McNulty s new book, gathers together several of his hard-to-find chapbooks, including Through High Still Air, poems, and journal entries from a season spent as a fire lookout atop Sourdough Mountain in the North Cascades. McNulty s deep resonance with the natural environment of the Northwest is infused with his gift for elegantly arranging words and images on the page. His poems are inhabited by tree frogs, raven, salmon, stars, wildfire, and deer mice. Eschewing abstraction, McNulty s writing reminds us of the joys of physical action grounded in place watching a white deer at Diablo Lake, skiing in the Methow, hiking Mount St. Helens, restoring the Elwha River. These poems serve as a manual for how to live more fully, more awake and aware, in our wild corner of the world. -Christian Martin, Cascadia Weekly