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The Great Blues:
GCreative Nonfiction on the Great Blue Herons of Viriditas, Kansas available through bookstores and the woodley press, $10 beginning February 28, 2005
An inspiring homage to Kansas’ great blue herons that mixes stunningly beautiful nature writing with an inventive postmodern narrative. It collects the musings of poets and hermits and blends them into a meditation on the fate of our very souls.
Comments:
“If Steve Semken were offered a cup of Heron blood to drink, he would do so without hesitation.If you read this book, you’ll know why.”
—Wes Jackson, President, Land Institute, Salina, Kansas; author, Becoming Native to This Place
“Steve Semken’s lyrical narrative draws the reader into a mythical world of hermits, herons and heretics. He celebrates the web of life through creative expression.”
—Robert Butler, Senior Research Scientist, Canadian Wildlife Service; author, The Great Blue Heron
“What happens when you enter a great blue heron rookery in Kansas and completely abandon yourself to the experience? In The Great Blues, naturalist Steve Semken becomes so engrossed in his subject that he, the observer, becomes the observed by the prophets of the prehistoric, the herons. Drawing on the writings of a range of profound thinkers from Hildegard to W.S. Merwin, Semken develops his own native Tao. He discovers the magic of his intuition and embarks upon an exploration of the soul external, finally centering himself in his faith in the natural world.”
—Mary Swander, author, The Desert Pilgrim: En Route to Mysticism and Miracles.
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Order from Amazon
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Hear a live reading from June 29 at Prairie Lights Bookstore
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“Portions of the book devoted to the natural history of herons were breathtaking...”
--Wapsipinicon Almanac
“He writes in a conversational style, embedded with quotations from an amazing range of sources: historians, biblical scholars, poets, philosophers ancient and modern, ecologists, theologians, hunters, local hermits, and heretics, even the Great Blues themselves.”
--The Iowa Source
The Great Blues was selected in Orion magazine’s Book Notes, Nov/Dec. 2005
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