Ever spent time in the south? Photographer James Valentine has an inner sense of sacred space and captures the primitive beauty still found throughout the region. This over-sized edition highlights natural landscapes aglow with mood and color; many views span two pages, inviting the eye to pan across fields and endless ranges. The book is loosely divided into sections according to time of day. We move from driftwood on the seashore at dawn to the soft lines of ancient mountains outlined by morning sun, descending deep into hollows where cool springs rise as the sun arcs west. This is a fine attempt at communicating the importance of 'backward' places dominated by the flowers of spring, the solitude of cool forests, the psychedelia of autumn fields, luminous skies and shallow creeks as ecological realities, holy and valuable in themselves as unique places and forms of energy worthy of protection and veneration. In contrast, I find Dickey's prose rather forced and awkward, but tolerable and thankfully minimal, neither adding nor detracting from the grandeur of the book. The only trace of human artifacts in any of these pictures is a distant trawler on the Atlantic and what appears to be a single little cabin hidden away in the folds of misty mountains.

This call to cherish wild places was well expressed almost fifty years ago in Wallace Stegner's Wilderness Letter -

"We need wilderness preserved--as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds--because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there--important, that is, simply as an idea." ( )