Why Homer matters
By: Adam Nicolson
Edition: First edition 2014.
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 297
ISBN-13: 9781627791793; 9781250074942
Subjects: Greek Epic poetry; Settings; Criticism and interpretation; Travel; LITERARY CRITICISM; Ancient & Classical; Landscapes; HISTORY; Description and travel; History and criticism; Influence; Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.); Ancient; Appreciation; Setting (Literature); Greece; Art appreciation
Description: "In this passionate, deeply personal book, Adam Nicolson explains why Homer matters--to him, to you, to the world--in a text full of twists, turns and surprises. In a spectacular journey through mythical and modern landscapes, Adam Nicholson explores the places forever haunted by their Homeric heroes. From Sicily, awash with wildflowers shadowed by Italy's largest oil refinery, to Ithaca, southern Spain, and the mountains on the edges of Andalusia and Extremadura, to the deserted, irradiated steppes of Chernobyl, where Homeric warriors still lie under the tumuli, unexcavated. This is a world of springs and drought, seas and cities, with not a tourist in sight. And all sewn together by the poems themselves and their great metaphors of life and suffering. Showing us the real roots of Homeric consciousness, the physical environment that fills the gaps between the words of the poems themselves, Nicholson's is itself a Homeric journey. A wandering meditation on lost worlds, our interconnectedness with our ancestors, and the surroundings we share. This is the original meeting of place and mind, our empathy with the past, our landscape as our drama. Following the acclaimed Gentry, which established him as one of the great landscape writers working today, Nicholson takes Homer's poems back to their source: beneath the distant, god-inhabited mountains, on the Trojan plains above the graves of the heroic dead, we find afresh the foundation level of human experience on Earth"--Publisher information.
Notes: "A John Macrae book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Meeting Homer; title: Grasping Homer; title: Loving Homer; title: Seeking Homer; title: Finding Homer; title: Homer the strange; title: Homer the real; title: The metal hero; title: Homer on the steppes; title: The gang and the city; title: Homer's mirror; title: Homer's Odyssey; title: Conclusion: The bright wake.