John Brandi, A Luminous Uplift, Landscape & Memory

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Purchase your copy of A Luminous Uplift, Landscape & Memory ($20.00, paperback) online from CW here or call the store to order (505) 988-4226.

A Luminous Uplift is a rich compendium of John Brandi's new and selected prose spanning four decades of investigative travels through the American Southwest to the far reaches of the Himalaya.

John Brandi’s selection of writings over the last four decades opens with a memoir addressing his awakening to landscape and poetry during his upbringing in California, his counterculture years in the Sixties, his Peace Corps work with indigenous farmers in the Andes, his eye-opening travels in India. Two sections of travel essays follow. The first is focused on his multiple visits to India, Sikkim and Nepal, with vivid descriptions of Khajuraho’s erotic temples, the ritual dances of Kerala, the monasteries of the Himalaya, his discovery of Ghalib’s poetry, his reflections on Baudelaire while lost in the crowds of Mumbai. Section two is focused on life and travel in the American Southwest: the sky villages of Hopi, the Deer Dance of Taos, walkabouts with Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki, his practice of haiku at home in the New Mexico mesa lands. The book closes with the author’s celebratory essay on where, exactly, the journey began that led him to New Mexico.

About the Poet

John Brandi’s high desert explorations, along with his excursions abroad, have been paramount to his life as a poet, visual artist, and author of numerous books of poetry, travel essays, and haiku. A California native, his boyhood forays into a landscape of desert, mountain, and seacoast opened a broader road of travel to the Pacific Rim, Southeast Asia, India, and the Himalayas. In the 1960s, as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Andes, he began publishing his poetry, energized by the alternative press movement. In 1971 he moved to New Mexico, built a mountain cabin, founded Tooth of Time Books, and began work as a poet in rural New Mexico schools, the Navajo Nation, Alaska, and the western states. Among his honors is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award, and exhibits of his paintings at the New Mexico History Museum, the Roswell Museum, and the Historic Santa Fe Foundation. He lives in the Río Chama watershed with his wife, poet Renée Gregorio.