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Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven / River Notes: The Dance of Herons
Here, for the first time in one volume, are two of Lopez's masterpieces, River Notes and Desert Notes . From the thundering power of the river's swift current, to the stillness of clear freshwater pools; to desert springs, birds and wind, and rattlesnakes . . . and the terrible intrusion of man, Lopez allows us to share moments of intense personal experience as man tries to come to terms with the Earth's landscape, and with his own existence.
144 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1979
92 people are currently reading
928 people want to read
About the author
Barry Lopez
105Ìýbooks895ÌýfollowersBarry Holstun Lopez is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its environmental and social concerns.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
April 18, 2008
For me this little book written when Lopez was very young (his first, I think), talks to and lifts my spirit like none other.
When I first read Desert Notes and especially this excerpt (below), I was surprised by my tears. And I don't cry easily.
A quote from Desert Notes: "This is how to do it. Wait for everything to get undressed and go to sleep. Forget to explain to yourself why you are here. Listen attentively. This is the sound of the loudest dreaming, the dreams of boulders. Continue to listen until the music isn't there. What you thought about boulders will evaporate and what you know will become clear. Each night it will be harder. Listen until you can hear the dreams of the dust that settles on your head."
When I first read Desert Notes and especially this excerpt (below), I was surprised by my tears. And I don't cry easily.
A quote from Desert Notes: "This is how to do it. Wait for everything to get undressed and go to sleep. Forget to explain to yourself why you are here. Listen attentively. This is the sound of the loudest dreaming, the dreams of boulders. Continue to listen until the music isn't there. What you thought about boulders will evaporate and what you know will become clear. Each night it will be harder. Listen until you can hear the dreams of the dust that settles on your head."
March 16, 2022
I arrived at Barry Lopez via his nonfiction work which I love for his adventures and the incredible ways he thinks through them. I was surprised to learn that this book was fiction, but Barry Lopez's incredible person is still so evident.
May 27, 2017
At times I wasn’t sure what I was reading about as some of the writing didn’t seem to make much sense to me. This is imaginative writing describing the sensations evoked by the desert and the river but I was disoriented between the observation of nature and obsessive and passionate intensity of imagining being in/part of the places and creatures Lopez describes.
I was never sure who the narrator was, at times an unnamed ‘I� and then a similarly unnamed ‘he�. At times I was thinking of abandoning the book and then a passage appealed to me and I read on. I preferred the stories in River Notes, of being by the river, observing the salmon for example returning to spawn, and the more straight-forward approach in Hanner’s Story, in which a river guide talks about the history of a community named Sheffield and the stories about the idyllic and far-fetched stories about these people. But overall I didn’t enjoy this book, and although I liked some of the descriptive writing, I was more baffled than enlightened
I was never sure who the narrator was, at times an unnamed ‘I� and then a similarly unnamed ‘he�. At times I was thinking of abandoning the book and then a passage appealed to me and I read on. I preferred the stories in River Notes, of being by the river, observing the salmon for example returning to spawn, and the more straight-forward approach in Hanner’s Story, in which a river guide talks about the history of a community named Sheffield and the stories about the idyllic and far-fetched stories about these people. But overall I didn’t enjoy this book, and although I liked some of the descriptive writing, I was more baffled than enlightened
September 21, 2019
I read one essay from this book in "The Sierra Club Trailside Reader" while on the Appalachian Trail - and loved it.
I found this book in a little bookstore on Orcas Island in WA. Read the whole thing and loved it back then. Read it again on the Grand Canyon and after, and loved it just as much or more. Read some out loud to our whole crew as our 3 boats were tied together, drifting downstream on a moonlit night, final miles after 17 magical days.
Basically an amazing prose poem, is how I think about it.
I found this book in a little bookstore on Orcas Island in WA. Read the whole thing and loved it back then. Read it again on the Grand Canyon and after, and loved it just as much or more. Read some out loud to our whole crew as our 3 boats were tied together, drifting downstream on a moonlit night, final miles after 17 magical days.
Basically an amazing prose poem, is how I think about it.
February 15, 2023
I didn't know that Berry Lopez wrote fiction and so I was excited for these short story collections. I’m definitely going to want to reread this while camping. As beautifully written as his nonfiction.
November 29, 2023
I’ve read many books about the desert and many books about rivers and loved them all deeply but this book�..the way he strives for poetic prose seems pretentious, the connections to the landscape superficial and awkward when he desperately wants them to be deep. As someone who enjoys this type of writing and loves other books of Barry Lopez, this book is disjointed and difficult to get attached to. I found it hard to finish despite it only being 150 pages and on my favorite subject to read about. There were some lovely moments which kept me reading, but as a whole, not what I was looking for.
December 29, 2024
I found the overabundance of metaphorical language to be rather annoying, which may be more to do with the delivery by the audiobook narrator or perhaps because I've been digesting far more non-fiction lately. I listened to it in west Texas, too, so the setting should've been ideal.
October 16, 2014
Interesting, but a little to flowery for my tastes.
August 3, 2017
Wow. What a great book. I read the "Raven" story about 10 times. So. Good.
May 25, 2022
Magical Realism. I always liked his nonfiction, but now I have a deeper appreciation for his fiction.
May 29, 2023
“I know you are tired. I am tired too. Will you walk along the edge of the desert with me? I would like to show you what lies before us.
All my life I have wanted to trick blood from a rock. I have dreamed about raising the devil and cutting him in half. I have thought too about never being afraid of anything at all. This is where you come to do those things.
I know what they tell you about the desert but you mustn’t believe them. This is no deathbed. Dig down, the earth is moist. Boulders have turned to dust here, the dust feels like graphite. You can hear a man breathe at a distance of twenty yards. You can see out there to the edge where the desert stops and the mountains begin. You think it is perhaps ten miles. It is more than a hundred. Just before the sun sets all the colors will change. Green will turn to blue, red to gold.
I’ve been told there is very little time left, that we must get all these things about time and place straight. If we don’t, we will only have passed on and have changed nothing. That is why we are here I think, to change things. It is why I came to the desert.�
All my life I have wanted to trick blood from a rock. I have dreamed about raising the devil and cutting him in half. I have thought too about never being afraid of anything at all. This is where you come to do those things.
I know what they tell you about the desert but you mustn’t believe them. This is no deathbed. Dig down, the earth is moist. Boulders have turned to dust here, the dust feels like graphite. You can hear a man breathe at a distance of twenty yards. You can see out there to the edge where the desert stops and the mountains begin. You think it is perhaps ten miles. It is more than a hundred. Just before the sun sets all the colors will change. Green will turn to blue, red to gold.
I’ve been told there is very little time left, that we must get all these things about time and place straight. If we don’t, we will only have passed on and have changed nothing. That is why we are here I think, to change things. It is why I came to the desert.�
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September 12, 2020I know of no other writer that so deftly--but also jarringly--blends the scientific with the eloquent and abstract. Somehow Barry Lopez always maintains crisp, calculated observation amidst dizzying allegory and fiction.
In these "notes"--vignettes, really--Lopez lets loose sketches and fables that continually assert that "It is impossible to speak with certainty about very much." It's exhausting, this journey into unknowing, but also exhilarating to realize our endpoint isn't a destination, but, rather, a beginning: "When you are suddenly overwhelmed with a compassion that staggers you...you will know a loss of guile and that the journey has begun."
In these "notes"--vignettes, really--Lopez lets loose sketches and fables that continually assert that "It is impossible to speak with certainty about very much." It's exhausting, this journey into unknowing, but also exhilarating to realize our endpoint isn't a destination, but, rather, a beginning: "When you are suddenly overwhelmed with a compassion that staggers you...you will know a loss of guile and that the journey has begun."
December 22, 2022
Oh a young Lopez, rages like a river with his observations and reflections, ornamenting nature with a dazzling display for his power of blending nonfiction and fiction so you can’t tell, so you relish, so you forget, and then delightfully reminded that if you pay attention to the world, to your thoughts, and to his words - they can take you anywhere. Reading this reminds me of a young Leonard, bursting through the pages of his novella Beautiful Losers, damned be the consequences of where it goes and it goes beautifully. Written in small 10-20 min stories, I think I’ll be revisiting these tracks to his album often. Fucking delicious read.
January 3, 2021
Crushing to be in the middle of this and hear news of Barry Lopez's passing on 12/25/20. Such weight to each of these stories--I could never read more than one at a time, no matter that each is only a few pages--and that weight became only more palpable and present. Those two words capture how Lopez relates to the world and builds his stories: with incredible presence, through which the other-than-human world becomes more clearly palpable to his readers. Much gratitude for this author and his words in the final weeks of 2020.
March 9, 2021
You don’t really read this book, you absorb it. It’s a set of messages from a timeless past.
Many of the essays? Poems? Are grounded in long stretches of observation, not to move a narrative forward but to soak in a moment. Many of the images don’t make logical sense, but do ring true. I spent some time looking for quotes to extract but they die when they’re pulled out of the pages, limp and pathetic facsimiles of life. So I guess I’ll just have to come back to it again later, and take another look.
Many of the essays? Poems? Are grounded in long stretches of observation, not to move a narrative forward but to soak in a moment. Many of the images don’t make logical sense, but do ring true. I spent some time looking for quotes to extract but they die when they’re pulled out of the pages, limp and pathetic facsimiles of life. So I guess I’ll just have to come back to it again later, and take another look.
July 27, 2019
Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven / River Notes: The Dance of Herons, by Barry Lopez 1990. I read this sometime in the past year. I was not inspired by it, and in the end, I’m not sure what Barry Lopez was aiming for. I made a few notes, which now I can’t find, and I re-sold the book to a used book store, so � this will have to do it.
April 23, 2024
Lopez is a master storyteller. His desert notes are mystical and metaphorical, a desert without a name. River Notes opens with The Search for the Heron, a truly magnificent essay. The river is the McKenzie in Oregon, where Lopez lived most of his life. The stories about the Log Jam are people stories; the rest are all about the river and what the river shares with us.
December 28, 2018
It has genuinely interesting moments, and it is a celebration of sustained attention and presence in nature, but alas, I thought it was too affected and overwrought. Also, the adjective "alkaline" to describe the desert and dust is overused.
January 12, 2020
I especially enjoyed the Desert Notes portion. The imagery of the desert and its mysterious-ness is captured so well by Lopez. I did have a little trouble with how disjointed some of it was but that is just the style.
October 29, 2023
It takes a special mindset to soak in the thoughts of Barry Lopez, for each essay takes on thoughts of its own. Prose poems, if you will. This read was specifically on River Notes and a few of the essays were felt throughout. It's a winter afternoon type of read.
March 15, 2024
I hold in my heart an absolute sorrow for birds, a sorrow so deep that at the first light of day when I shiver like reeds clattering in a fall wind I do not know whether it is from the cold or from this sorrow, whether I am even capable of feeling such kindness.
August 22, 2017
Really good. Staggering at times. Liked Desert Notes a bit more. Definitely planning to read Arctic Dreams now.
December 29, 2019
What stunning, stunning prose. A poet's eye. Will be a book I read again in the future.
May 21, 2020
Check out the discussion in the Nature Literature group.
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March 22, 2021Really enjoyed Desert Notes. Struggled to get through River Notes.
December 1, 2022
I have read a lot off great reads by Barry Lopez, but for some reason these essays were hard to get into and enjoy. Now I must reread River Notes and Crossing Open Ground.
December 18, 2023
Love Barry Lopez. This is a minor work.
July 1, 2024
Sorry, didn't get it.
Read 28%.
Read 28%.
July 8, 2024
Incredible
September 20, 2024
Very interesting anthropomorphic narrative view point.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
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