Lewis Nordan

Delta Land - Author and Artist Series Lewis Nordan

Marc Notes: Haunting photo project & prose recording preservation of Mississippi landscapes -- mule barns, churches, cotton gins, railroad stations... Jacket Description/Flap: In its stark, black-and-white beauty, a haunting portrait of the vast Mississippi Delta landscapeReview Quotes:"For finding poetry in this slow, languorous countryscape, Ms. Clay deserves much credit."--"New York Times"Review Quotes:"Hovering over it all is history, evoked in the words scrawled on a makeshift grave marker: 'Gone but not forgotten.'"--"New Yorker"Publisher Marketing: Although many acclaimed photographers have focused their cameras on the Mississippi Delta, no photographer, until now, has attempted to produce a photographic interpretation of the land itself. The images in this book, all taken by Maude Schuyler Clay between 1993 and 1998, are the result of the first such undertaking.""Delta Land,"" she says, "is a photographic project which involves the recording and preservation of the Mississippi Delta landscape and its rapidly disappearing indigenous structures: mule barns, field churches, cotton gins, commissaries, crossroads stores, tenant houses, cypress sheds, and railroad stations."Moving back in 1987 to the Delta (Tallahatchie County), where I am the fifth generation to live here, allowed me to view the endemic and ordinary landscape as a disappearing way of life. With this work, begun in 1993, I feel I have completed an artistic and educational body of photographs that show the landscape and culture of this particular place; that I have preserved through photography the communities of both whites and African Americans of the Delta region."In an introductory essay that populates Clay's almost people-less settings, Lewis Nordan tells how these photographs evoke his Delta boyhood. Like her images, his memories are in black-and-white, "the color of grief and all its metaphors." As he recalls the scrappy farms and flaking towns swallowed by the vast flatlands, he writes of his mother's maverick dog and its need of a country home. In Clay's terrains, Nordan sees the Delta land that is at once memorable, familiar, and astonishing. Review Citations:

Ingram Advance 10/01/1999 pg. 188 (EAN 9781578061778, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:  Nordan, Lewis Lewis Nordan grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and was fifteen when Emmet Till was murdered. Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh for many years, he is the author of seven books of fiction and a memoir. His many awards include three American Library Association Notable Book citations, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction, the Mississippi Authors award for fiction, and the Southern Book Critics Circle award for fiction. Contributor Bio:  Clay, Maude Schuyler Maude Schuyler Clay lives in Sumner, Mississippi. Her photographic work has appeared in "Vanity Fair", "Esquire", the "New York Times Magazine", and the "London Observer Magazine", and in "Women Photographers", "Mothers and Daughters", and other books.