Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day

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.

Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman is the author of many highly acclaimed works of nonfiction, including "A Natural History of the Senses" — a book beloved by readers all over the worldand the volumes "Deep Play, A Slender Thread, The Rarest of the Rare, A Natural History of Love, The Moon by Whale Light, " and a memoir on flying, "On Extended Wings."

Her poetry has been collected into six volumes, among them "Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems" and, most recently, "Praise My Destroyer."

Ms. Ackerman has received many prizes and awards, including the John Burroughs Nature Award and the Lavan Poetry Prize. A Visiting Professor at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, she was the National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Professor at the University of Richmond. Ms. Ackerman also has the unusual distinction of having had a molecule named after her — dianeackerone. She lives in upstate New York.

Laural Merlington has performed and directed for 30 years in regional theaters throughout the country. She has recorded over 100 audiobooks, including many by Fern Michaels, and is the recipient of several AudioFile Magazine Earphone Awards. In addition to her extensive theater and voiceover work, Laural teaches college in her home state of Michigan.