Old Tale Road

Poetry. OLD TALE ROAD, Andrew Schelling's first full collection of poetry in six years, is a visionary work of crisply detailed language and wide-ranging content. It balances the ecological, mythic, and personal realms, while carrying the flavor of American ballads or blues. There are poems in haibun form, lyric songs, linked-verse, and a Noh play. The personae of OLD TALE ROAD include friends, ghosts, lovers, Buddhist monks, dead poets, mountain spirits, and the strangely named animals of the American West. "Andrew Schelling is the latest incarnation in an American poetic lineage that began with the Transcendentalists and moved west with Rexroth and Snyder: the unlikely and fortuitous conjunction of wilderness expertise, the observational precision of a natural historian, homegrown radical politics, and an immersion in Asian philosophy and writing"--Eliot Weinberger.