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Synopsis
A celebrated storyteller-poet-naturalist explores a year of dawns in her most personal book to date.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Short of all those thanatosomniphobiacs out there -- the folks who fear dying in their sleep -- few hail the dawn with as much gratitude as Diane Ackerman. In the gathering light, her senses are alert and receptive to a parade of glories: mind-bending colors in the sky, the smell of a lover s skin, the ruckus of birdsong, the morning glory itself -- not the flower (though that too), but a meteorological event: long rolling clouds, rushing forward while spinning backward, a nursery for thunderstorms and awe. She is also happy to have made it through another patch of dangerous darkness, and we nod in agreement, remembering how vulnerable we feel, how our skin crawls, when night is truly pitch black. Our reptilian core has not surrendered its dread of night, even in these light-polluted times. "It s as survivors that we greet each day," she writes in this collection of luxurious, whither-where-I-wander meditations on the break of day. Then again, dawn is the time of duels and the clash of armies, when predators do their best work. Beauty, danger, sensuality -- just Ackerman s cup of tea.