Böcker utgivna av University of Iowa Press

This collection of short lyric poems evoke certain themes: interaction of and struggle between the human and natural world; violence, particularly against women and children; alienation and betrayal; the mysteries of the universe, God and death; and poetry itself.

This collection of poems explores various kinds of longing and loss - sex, death, exile, story, love, and time. These poems draw from culture, both high and low - Eno and Aquinas, Lassie and Donne, Silicon Valley and Walden Pond.

Although she is now best known as a writer of novels and short stories, Gilman was known to her contemporaries as an advocate of reform on social, economic and religious fronts. These essays seek to remind the reader that the main purpose of her writing was reform.

This guide to the prairie plants native to Iowa provides all the information necessary for identifying and distinguishing even the most similar species. Species are described from the ground up: stem, leaf, bud, flower, fruit and habitat. The time of flowering/fruiting is given for central Iowa.

In 1990 an international group of biologists, meeting to discuss rumors of declines in the number of amphibians, discovered that amphibian disappearances once thought to be a local problem were not--the problem was global. And, even more disturbing, amphibians were disappearing not just from areas settled by humans but from regions of the world once believed to be pristine. Under the mantle of the Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force, this timely book addresses three fundamental questions for the midwestern United States: are amphibians declining; if so, why; and, if so, what can be done to halt these losses?In the Midwest--defined here as Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan--there can be no doubt that the number of salamanders and frogs has declined with Euro-American settlement and the conversion to an agriculturally dominated landscape. Habitat loss and landscape fragmentation have been major factors in this decline, as have aquacultural uses of natural wetlands. Bullfrog introductions have eliminated populations of native amphibians, and collecting for the biological supply trade has reduced the number of individuals within many populations. The goal of the forty-two essays in this well-documented, well-illustrated book is to put between two covers all we know now about the status of midwestern amphibians. By doing this, the editor has created a readily accessible historical record for future studies.Organized into sections covering landscape patterns and biogeography, species status, regional and state status, diseases and toxins, conservation, and monitoring and applications, this landmark volume will serve as the foundation for amphibian conservation in the Midwest.

Resource protection and public recreation policies have always been subject to the shifting winds of management philosophy governing both national and state parks. Somewhere in the balance, however, parks and preserves have endured as unique places of mind as well as matter. Places of Quiet Beauty allows us to see parks and preserves, forests and wildlife refuges - all those special places that the term "park" conjures up - as measures of our own commitment to caring for the environment. In this broad-ranging book, historian Rebecca Conard examines the complexity of American environmentalism in the twentieth century as manifest in Iowa's state parks and preserves.

In 1985 Time magazine ran on its cover Garrison Keillor's face superimposed across the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, taking the publication of Keillor's book of the same name as an occasion to raise some hoopla over this "radio bard" (he was then host of the highly acclaimed "A Prairie Home Companion" variety show) and humorist nonpareil. Not since Will Rogers has a crackerbarrel philosopher become a national figure, a celebrity. And it is the rare down-home fellow from the prairies ("radio's tallest shy person") who also happens to write for the New Yorker. In this lucid, well-researched study Peter A. Scholl follows chronologically the dual career of Garrison Keillor, the pen name Gary Edward Keillor has been using since he was 13, exploring the Minnesotan's double mastery of the arts of storytelling and writing. Scholl looks at how Keillor's writing and conceptions for radio - particularly the News from Lake Wobegon on "A Prairie Home Companion" - has influenced his writing. Keillor's humorous sketches and stories have appeared in the New Yorker since 1970 (he was on its staff from 1987 to 1992); his books - Happy to Be Here (1982), Lake Wobegon Days (1985), We Are Still Married (1989), Leaving Home (1987), and WLT: A Radio Romance (1991) - have met critical and popular success. Scholl finds that if Keillor attained his widest acclaim as a yarnspinner in the nineteenth-century traditions of local color and literary comedy - the foremost progenitor of which being Mark Twain - he revitalized those traditions while adopting comic modes and playing roles that had little precedent in eras other than his own. Keillor's being a New Yorker writer has, according to Scholl, almost symmetrically affected the structure and nuance of his oral tales: they represent a cross-pollination between traditional oral storytelling and the verbal artistry of not only the New Yorker writers the young Keillor so admired - James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, A. J. Liebling, and E. B. White - but also such experimentalist writers as Donald Barthelme. Scholl in fact compares the darker side of Keillor's humor with the postmodernism of Barthelme - and, perhaps at the other end of the spectrum, he draws some parallels between Keillor's tales and those of Jean Shepherd, whose fictional town of Hohman, Indiana, has served him in the same way Lake Wobegon has Keillor. In this engaging, balanced literary portrait, Scholl analyzes how Keillor's public career as a radio performer has often put him at odds with his more solitary life as a writer. At least four times Keillor has quit his positions in radio to devote himself more exclusively to writing, and this oscillation between two callings, notes Scholl, reveals a complex ambivalence in Keillor's career - an ambivalence that might just add to the poignancy and uniqueness of the stories Keillor tells.

Iowa is the only state that lies entirely within the natural region of the tallgrass prairie. Early documents indicate that 85 percent of the state - close to 30 million acres - was covered by prairie vegetation at the time of Euro-American settlement. By 1930 the prairie sod had been almost totally converted to cropland; only about 30,000 acres of the original "great green sea" remained. Now, in this gracefully illustrated manual, Shirley Shirley has created a step-by-step guide to reconstructing the natural landscape of Iowa and the Upper Midwest. Chapters on planning, obtaining and selecting plants and seeds, starting seeds indoors, preparing the site, planting, and maintenance set the stage for comprehensive species accounts. Shirley gives firsthand information on soil, moisture, sun and pH requirements; location, size, and structure; blooming time and color; and propagation, germination, and harvesting for more than a hundred wildflowers and grasses. Shirley's sketches - all drawn from native plants and from seedlings that she grew herself - will be valuable for even the most experienced gardener. While other books typically feature only the flowering plant, her careful drawings show the three stages of the seedling, the flower, and the seedhead with seeds as well as the entire plant. This practical and attractive volume will help anyone dedicated to reconstructing the lost "emerald growth" of the historic tallgrass prairie.

This stimulating collection of essays, the first comprehensive critical examination of the work of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, deals individually with his five major plays and also addresses issues crucial for the role of history, the relationship of African ritual to African American drama, gender relations in the African American community, music and cultural identity, the influence of Romare Bearden's collages, and the politics of drama. With essays by virtually all the scholars who have currently published on Wilson along with many established and newer scholars of drama and/or African American literature.

In the final years of the twentieth century we live with omnipresent worries. Will the Amazonian forests survive current deforestation trends? Will Amazonia's native populations survive the spread of diseases and the expropriation of traditional territories? Will the promise of biotechnology ever be fulfilled, given the genetic losses we are experiencing? Will scientists find new chemical substances in the forests of Amazonia to cure diseases heretofore incurable or yet unknown? Will we learn to use, rather than thoughtlessly destroy, the thousands of tropical species that we now consider without value? Will we invest in agronomic research to find ways to achieve sustainable cultivation in the humid tropics? In June 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the world was finally ready to ask these questions. In this well-written, comprehensive, reasonable yet passionate volume, Emilio Moran introduces us to the range of human and ecological diversity in the Amazon Basin. Beginning with a description of its Indian and peasant populations and their knowledge of their environment, he describes the Amazon's widely contrasting ecosystems, their ecological variations, and the human strategies of resource use workable within each environment. Every ecosystem - from upland forests to floodplains, savannas to blackwater rivers - offers opportunities as well as limitations; each has unique characteristics that can be used advantageously or resisted at great cost. By describing the complex heterogeneity of the Amazon's ecological mosaic and its indigenous populations' conscious adaptations to this diversity, Moran leads us to realize that there are strategies of resource use which do notdestroy the structure and function of ecosystems. Finally, and most important, he examines ways in which we might benefit from the study of human ecology to design and implement a balance between conservation and use. Through Amazonian Eyes shows that the traditional inhabitants of Ama

How do historians represent the past? How do theatre historians represent performance events? The fifteen challenging essays in Representing the Past focus on the fundamental epistemological conditions and procedures that serve as the foundational ideas that guide all historians in their endeavours.

Travelling across the invisible landscape in which we imaginatively dwell, Kent Ryden - himself a most careful listener and reader - asks the following questions. What categories of meaning do we read into our surroundings? What forms of expression serve as the most reliable maps to understanding those meanings?

A collection of ninety-nine micro-essays for poets, critics, and scholars who teach and for students who wish to learn about the many ways poets think about how a poem comes alive from within - and beyond - a classroom. The essays in this fresh and innovative volume address both reading and writing and give teachers and students useful tools for the classroom and beyond.

In this first book-length study of the personal essay, Carl Klaus unpacks the writer's made-up self and the manifold ways in which a wide range of essayists and essay have brought it to life. By reconceiving the most fundamental aspect of the personal essay--the I of the essayist--Klaus demonstrates that this seemingly uncontrived form of writing is inherently problematic, not wilfully devious but bordering upon the world of fiction. He develops this key idea by explaining how structure, style, and voice determine the nature of a persona and our perception of it in the works of such essayists as Michel de Montaigne, Charles Lamb, E. B. White, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, George Orwell, Joan Didion, Richard Rodriquez, Alice Walker, and Leslie Marmon Silko.