Robert Finch arrived in Newfoundland in the summer of 1995 heartsick, directionless, his old life on Cape Cod in tatters. Burnside, located in Newfoundland's rugged northeast, seemed like a good place to heal. The coastal village was home to just fifty year-round residents, and accessible only by a hundred-mile ferry crossing. Finch was drawn in by the landscape of low ridges and archipelagos of rocky islands, but he returned to Burnside for its strong sense of community, and the possibility that it might provide a new pattern for his ow life.

Eventually Finch became a summer resident, buying a house, playing organ for the church, and fishing the area's waters. Offering a portrait of the Newfoundland character and culture, Summers in Squid Tickle explores how three generations of the village have grappled with the changes of the past century--from the rise and collapse of commercial cod fishing, and the migration of young people away from the outport, to the distant hope for tourism and new industries to sustain a disappearing way of life. With characteristically elegant prose and deep sensitivity, Finch introduces us to Squid Tickle's inhabitants--a collection of hardy fishermen, vigorous retirees, and close neighbors, as well as the woman who would become his wife.

Even as the fish in Squid Tickle's waters vanish, Finch sketches the enduring relationship of a village with the sea--for food, work, leisure, and a rich community life--in the midst of an unforgiving but stunning landscape. Summers in Squid Tickle speaks to the desire we all have in our era to seek quiet, and to reevaluate our connection to each other and the natural world.

Weaving together Robert Finch's collected writings from over fifty years and a thousand miles of walking along Cape Cod's Atlantic coast, The Outer Beach is a poignant, candid chronicle of an iconic American landscape anyone with an appreciation for nature will cherish.

For nearly a decade, Robert Finch traveled around the edge of North America -- the stunning yet seriously inhospitable island of Newfoundland. Here, he chronicles the people, geography, and wildlife of this remote and lovely place. In beautifully written essays, sketches, and stories, Finch roams from verdant valleys to the rocky cliffs of Cape Spear, from Sandy Cove to Squid Tickle, from the steep streets of historic St. John's to the moss-covered tundra of the southern coast. As he describes the land, he brings to life the island's diverse array of characters -- newcomers and old-timers, fisherman, hunters, hitchhikers, and children. Most of all, The Iambics of Newfoundland shows readers the island itself -- an ancient place tucked between provinces, languages, and cultures -- struggling to find a footing in the modern world.

Essays by Cape Cod nature writer Robert Finch, inviting the reader to enjoy special places on the landscape of Cape Cod and the Islands.

When Common Ground was first published, Annie Dillard praised Robert Finch's essays for their strength, subtlety, and above all their geniality. New readers will have a chance to discover that Finch's Cape Cod is indeed a wonderful place. The birds, fish, and animals that share the cape's fragile ecology on any given summer day with the human residents are described with the fresh eye of a first-rate nature writer.

On fog-shrouded barrier island or deep in winter woods, eighteen essays describe the wild, outer half of Cape Cod. Robert Finch is a vivid witness to our participation, whether as individuals or as communities, in the mysteries of natural experience. As he explains: One of the primary reasons this place yields so much to me so consistently is that I have invested so much of myself into it, physically, mentally, and emotionally . . . a thousand simple, repeated, physical acts have given this landscape a texture for me so that even its most casual aspect is filled, not with slick charm or abstract nostalgia, but with living, tactile memory. In these essays, Finch demonstrates once again his profound willingness to ask essential questions. These essays recognize our need for both the human and the nonhuman in our lives; they probe the ambiguities in our response to the terror and beauty of the natural world and the love and aggression we struggle with in our associations with one another. Robert Finch's remarkable prose offers high entertainment, but also gives us new sympathies for and understanding of both nature and ourselves.

Essays on the natural history of the Cape Cod region document changes in the environment, and in the author's life.

Spanning more than 20 years, these essays record changes not only in the natural environment of Cape Cod but in the writer's own life. Death of a Hornet is one man's elegant rendering of Cape Cod, a sandy, scrub-oaked, tough, and vulnerable spit of land reaching out into the Atlantic Ocean. These stories are natural adventures that Finch's previous readers have come to expect, as well as longer meditations on the future of the Cape's fragile environment, on living in one place for a long time, and on the limitations of human sympathy.

Those who have encountered Cape Cod--or merely dipped into an account of its rich history--know that it is a singular place. Robert Finch writes of its beaches: No other place I know sears the heart with such a constant juxtaposition of pleasure and pain, of beauty being born and destroyed in the same moment. And nowhere within its borders is this truth more vivid and dramatic than along the forty miles of Atlantic coast--what Finch has always known as the Outer Beach. The essays here represent nearly fifty years and a cumulative thousand miles of walking along the storied edge of the Cape's legendary arm.

Finch considers evidence of nature's fury: shipwrecks, beached whales, towering natural edifices, ferocious seaside blizzards. And he ponders everyday human interactions conducted in its environment with equal curiosity, wit, and insight: taking a weeks-old puppy for his first beach walk; engaging in a nocturnal dance with one of the Cape's fabled lighthouses; stumbling, unexpectedly, upon nude sunbathers; or even encountering out-of-towners hoping an Uber will fetch them from the other side of a remote dune field.

Throughout these essays, Finch pays tribute to the Outer Beach's impressive literary legacy, meditates on its often-tragic history, and explores the strange, mutable nature of time near the ocean. But lurking behind every experience and observation--both pivotal and quotidian--is the essential question that the beach beckons every one of its pilgrims to confront: How do we accept our brief existence here, caught between overwhelming beauty and merciless indifference?

Finch's affable voice, attentive eye, and stirring prose will be cherished by the Cape's staunch lifers and erstwhile visitors alike, and strike a resounding chord with anyone who has been left breathless by the majestic, unrelenting beauty of the shore.

This is a voyage of discovery, a personal odyssey into the nature of a single Cape Cod neighborhood. It is a rich portrait, beautifully drawn, of a landscape and a community whose essential character lies in their penetrating interface with the sea. But it is also an individual quest, a journey of the heart and mind in which the author seeks entrance, or rather re-entrance into that vast living maze stretching out beyond my lines of sight.

The collection includes famous passages by and about such writers as Melville, Thoreau, Helen Keller, Edmund Wilson, and Kurt Vonnegut, among others.

Cape Cod: its natural and cultural history: a guide to Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts is a classic book, that has held significant value throughout history, and to ensure its timeless wisdom is never lost, Alpha Editions has carefully preserved it by republishing it in a modern, accessible format for both present and future generations. Thoughtfully reformatted, retyped, and newly designed, this edition offers a clear and readable text-free from scanned copies of the original work. Alpha Editions is dedicated to breathing new life into antique and classic books, making these literary treasures available once again for readers who cherish history, culture, and timeless knowledge.

It has long been the custom to condemn eighteenth-century French poetry outright as generally unworthy of attention. However, in keeping with a recent change of attitude towards this vast and diverse body of literature, Professor Finch here undertakes to isolate a certain group of poets, belonging to the first half of the century, who may appropriately be called individualistes and who are in various ways characteristic of a definite and important trend of their time. The authors he has chosen were selected from the larger group of individualists because each provides, in addition to his poems, a complete statement of his own conception of poetry and of that conception which is common to the group as a whole. Since the works treated are comparatively unfamiliar the author has considered them from a historical and an analytical as well as a critical point of view. In addition he has devoted three special chapters to a literary historian (Evrard Titon du Tillet) and to three critical theorists (Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Yves-Marie André, and Charles Batteux) whose contemporary writings, while they may or may not have influenced the poets here examined, support, reflect, or confirm their ideas and practice. Texts of these poets are not easily available and the numerous representative quotations from the poems given in this book will be welcomed by the reader.

This anthology has a double aim: to present a body of poetry, none of it easily available, some of it never before reproduced, and to point up a particular trend, until now nearly lost sight of in the maze of generalizations about eighteenth-century French poetry. This trend, called individualist, in contradistinction to the academic and universalist trends of the century, has been chosen since it is the least known and most original of the three.

The individualist poets are avowed moderns, and their attitude toward poetry and their concept of its nature often anticipate attitudes held by our poets of our own time. There has not been available to this point a sufficiently representative body of poems by these poets, a gap that Professors Finch and Joliat have attempts to fill with their anthology.

Readers will find the notes to the poems especially useful, since many of them provide out-of-the-way background material and, as well, offer new insights into the poetry of the individualist poets as a group.