These essays employ fire as a metaphor for the crucial moment when deeply held viewpoints yield to new experiences - the moment when our spirits and minds broaden and mature ... [The author] here writes and riffs on a wide range of topics. He explores southwestern European Paleolithic cave art, and his own personal poetic history with haiku. He offers ... reminiscences of his youthful West Coast logging and trail crew day, and the talks he gave in...

Mountains and Rivers is an epic of geology, prehistory, and planetary mythologies. It is a poem about land and its processes, a book about wisdom, compassion, and myth, and a narrative work that is not quite like anything else.

"In these intimate, free-wheeling conversations, a baker's dozen of the poets of San Francisco talk about the scene then and now, the traditions of poetry, and about anarchism, globalism, Zen, the Bomb, the Kabbalah, and the Internet."--Page 4 of printed paper wrapper.