Walking is back in the zeitgeist here. Seattle author and New York Times columnist Tim Egan has a new book, A Pilgrimage to Eternity, about hoofing it from Canterbury to Rome in search of faith. There’s The Seattle Walk Report, an Instagram-eye-view of the city by a writer/cartoonist with a gift for spotting marvelous detail of the city’s fabric from its sidewalks. In the new Netflix video series “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates,” the Microsoft co-founder is interviewed while on walks, and we learn that he thinks — or processes — best while walking or pacing. High on the list of new walking works is David Guterson’s latest book, Turn Around Time: A Walking Poem for the Pacific Northwest, published this fall by The Mountaineers.
Mountaineers Books is not known for publishing poetry. The company’s reputation has been built on hiking guides and mountaineering memoirs. This is a first: an epic poem by a famous writer. Guterson is one of Seattle’s preeminent authors, behind such novels as Snow Falling on Cedars, Ed King, and The Other, books deeply imbued with Northwest locales, history and serious themes.
Turn Around Time has these aspects, but much more. It reads like a cerebral exercise in the outdoors, a poem not simply about hiking, but about the journey of life itself. It is augmented with black and white illustrations by Northwest artist Justin Gibbens.
