John Elder – författare

The pivotal figure in ""Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa"" is the nineteenth-century diplomat and writer George Perkins Marsh, generally regarded as America's first environmentalist. Like Elder, Marsh was a Vermonter, and his diplomatic career took him for some years to Italy, where, witnessing the ecological devastation wrought upon the landscape by runaway deforestation and the plundering of other natural resources, he was moved to produce his famous manifesto, ""Man and Nature"". Marsh drew parallels between the despoiled Italian environment and his home landscape of Vermont, warning that the latter was vulnerable to ecological woes of a similar magnitude if not carefully maintained and protected. In short, his was a prescient voice for stewardship.Elder follows in Marsh's footsteps along a trajectory running from Vermont to Italy, and at length fetches up at the managed forest of Vallombrosa. Punctuated throughout with learned and genial considerations of the poetry of Wordsworth, Basho, Dante, and Frost, Elder's narrative takes up issues of sustainability as practiced locally, reports on family doings, and returns finally - as did Marsh's - to Vermont, where he measures traditional stewardship values against more aggressive conservation-oriented measures such as the expansion of wilderness areas.

A landmark work in the burgeoning field of literary ecology, Imagining the Earth explores the ways in which our attitudes toward nature are mirrored in and influenced by poetry. In the work of some of our most widely read poets, says John Elder, one can discern a resurgent vision of humanity in harmony with the rest of the natural order.To show us the power of poetry to identify, interpret, and celebrate a wide range of issues related to nature and our place in it, Elder uses numerous examples of works by Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, A. R. Ammons, Denise Levertov, and William Everson. Elder places these poets within a cultural tradition flowing from William Wordsworth through Alfred North Whitehead, T. S. Eliot, and Robinson Jeffers, and uses their poems to illuminate the relationships between culture and wilderness, imagination and landscape, and science and poetry. Elder's commentaries are interlinked with two remarkable essays in which he describes his ow

The North Woods tradition of making maple syrup serves as an illuminating backdrop for John Elder’s reflections on nature, literature, playfulness, and fatherhood, as he builds a sugaring house with his sons.The tail end of the sugaring season in New England is called the “frog run,” when pools of snowmelt teem with frogs and the last run of sap good for making syrup flows from the maple trees. For John Elder, a longtime resident of Vermont, a professor of English, and a man at midlife, this moment is a metaphor of loss and resurgence.In The Frog Run, Elder describes how he found a way to balance his passions for literature and for the outdoors by building a sugarhouse with his sons in the Vermont woods. For Elder, who also writes in this book about the resurgence of New England forests and about his life as a reader—moving from the game of Go to the Psalms and Bashō—the frog run is a time to savor and celebrate the fleeting beauties of his family’s place on earth.Moving and elegant, The Frog Run is a testimony to the value of embracing what seems lost.

Archipelago is one of the most important and influential literary magazines of the lasttwenty years. Running to twelve editions, it was edited by Andrew McNeillie, with theassistance later of James McDonald Lockhart, and began as an attempt to reimagine therelationships between the islands of Ireland and Britain. Archipelago has brought togetherestablished and emerging artists in creative conversations that have transformed the studyof islands, coasts and waterways. It journeys from the Shetlands to Cornwall, from theAran Islands to the coast of Yorkshire, tracing the cultures of diverse zones through someof the best in contemporary writing about place and people.This collection gathers poetry, prose and visual art in clusters grouped around the Irishand British archipelago, with contributions from an array of significant artists. It includesnewly commissioned work as well as an interview between Andrew McNeillie andRobert Macfarlane on the development of Archipelago across the years.

Table of Contents: Ensembles Discovered / Predictive Learning and Decision Trees / Model Complexity, Model Selection and Regularization / Importance Sampling and the Classic Ensemble Methods / Rule Ensembles and Interpretation Statistics / Ensemble Complexity