Ice Mountain

Aldo Leopold once observed that "one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." In Ice Mountain: An Elegy, poet and naturalist Dave Bonta invites us to share this solitude. In spare, linked verses informed by decades of close study of his home ground, he chronicles the slow end of winter on a mountaintop in central Pennsylvania, part of a landscape subtly but profoundly shaped by the last Ice Age. With climate change accelerating, how many more years will we get to appreciate a true Appalachian spring? But our ham-fisted efforts to address global warming also come with a price, and Bonta laments the damage done by installing a wind plant on the neighboring ridge-Ice Mountain. Looking both inward and outward, this is a poetry too honest to take refuge in easy solutions but too much in love with the world to indulge in despair. The 132-page book includes illustrations from original linocuts by Elizabeth Adams, and is beautifully printed on cream paper with a heavy, matte-varnished cover.