Earth Apples: The Poetry of Edward Abbey

by Edward Abbey

Overview

Poems about love and landscapes by the author of the classic Desert Solitaire, an “environmentalist, nature writer, novelist and all-around iconoclast” (The New York Times).
 
While better known for his nature writing and his comic classic The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey was also an enthusiastic creator of verse. The New York Times called his memoir Desert Solitaire “deeply poetic”—and now Earth Apples gives us his actual poetry, in Abbey’s first and only collection.
 
Whether writing about vast desert landscapes, New York City, or a love of bawdy women, Abbey's verse is eloquent, irreverent, and unapologetically passionate. The poems gathered here, published digitally for the first time, are culled from Abbey’s journals and give an insightful and unique glance into the mind of this literary legend.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780795317545
Publisher:	RosettaBooks
Publication date:	10/01/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Edward Abbey was born in Home, Pennsylvania in 1927. In 1944, at the age of seventeen, Abbey set out to explore the American Southwest, bumming around the country by hitchhiking and hopping freight trains. It was during this time that Abbey developed a love of the desert, which would shape his life and his art for the next forty years. After a brief stint in the military, Abbey completed his education at the University of New Mexico and later, at the University of Edinburgh. He took employment as a park ranger and fire lookout at several different National Parks throughout his life, experiences from which he drew for his many books. Abbey died at his home in Oracle, Arizona in 1989.

Edward Abbey spent most of his life in the American Southwest. He was the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including the celebrated Desert Solitaire, which decried the waste of America’s wilderness, and the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, the title of which is still in use today to describe groups that purposefully sabotage projects and entities that degrade the environment. Abbey was also one of the country’s foremost defenders of the natural environment. He died in 1989.

Editorial Reviews

A lovely production (with original artwork by Michael McCurdy), but this simpleminded poesy is less than a footnote to the life of the late, great eco-anarchist. (RC) Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

One would expect Abbey's poetry to be embarrassing, and it is. Unlike the poetry of Ernest Hemingway, which is scatological, too, but often clever, Abbey's poetry reveals the man at his worst: chasing after young things (who, to be sure, chased after "him)", venomous toward other writers, and elitist about his precious West. There's one pleasing diatribe here, "A Simple-Minded Song of Hatred," in which Abbey unleashes his many years of hating New York, the "vampire city," the "Island of madness! Death ship! Concrescence of sickness, sore point, needle of lunacy"--you get the drift. New York bashing is a tired sport, however, and even Abbey's claims over the years that the Manhattan literati didn't appreciate him rang hollow, since there were about as many New York critics celebrating him as bashing him. Now that the man is dead--and with, it would seem, so few candidates to choose from--they're turning him into a saint. Buy this if you must.

John Mort