Tracks of the Unseen: Meditations on Alaska Wildlife, Landscape, and Photography
Lyrical northern essayist Jans, who evoked his life as an arctic schoolteacher inThe LastLight Breaking, here turns to his avocation: spending time in the wilderness shooting animals--bearing a gun at first, and later, while never quite putting the gun down (there are, after all, bears out there), a camera. In this rangy collection of vignettes and photographs, he once again shows why he is one of Alaska's best writers. His style is sharp and poetic: "I leaned on hope like cold glass," he says of his emotions upon hearing that friends were lost on the tundra. He possesses unblinking bifocal vision, the ability to see the raw pain of arctic life and its overwhelming beauty simultaneously. Similarly, his photographs offer glimpses of the wild spaces that continue to call to Jans decades after he first encountered them. Many are drawn to the North, but few are chosen by it. Jans is one of those chosen.Patricia MonaghanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved