My sixth book is Unnamed Canyon. The book’s description:

Unnamed Canyon is a book in two parts: first, a meditation on teaching and teachers; and second, a consequent exploration of the major themes of my formative years in higher education in the nineties. The questions I visit and revisit are of our moment—the relation of imagination and reality changes like the seasons, each poem a renewed response to the elemental forces that shape our lives.

At the heart of the book is the prospect, and then experience, of sending my oldest child off to college at Berkeley, my alma mater. The two-part structure, about teaching and about my own experience at university, reflects this. At a perhaps somewhat deeper level, connected to these themes, the book is a Daoist argument against the Buddhist teaching of non-attachment, a celebration of spontaneity and love for each person’s unique expression of the human nature.