From his vantage point as a garden designer and writer based in Kyoto, Marc Peter Keane examines the world around him and delivers astonishing insights through an array of narratives. How the names of gardens reveal their essential meaning. A new definition of what art is. What trees are really made of. The true meaning of the enigmatic torii gate found at Shinto shrines. Why we give flowers as gifts. The essential, underlying unity of the world.

The garden as a poem. Not simply a beautiful design to be appreciated by looking, but a living poem that can actually be read. That is the way gardens were thought of in Japan during the Heian period (794-1185). In that ancient society, a detailed understanding of poetry was an essential part of life for people in the literate classes. Poetic anthologies were learned by heart and all manner of communications either included poems or were interwoven with references to poetry. A central aspect of Heian-period poetry was that it employed images of nature as symbols of human emotions. A lonely pine tree on a windswept, rocky seashore evoked the bitter sadness of someone waiting for their lover. A scene of cut reeds, fallen and scattered this way and that, was a standard epithet to express unsettled, scattered emotions. When gardens were built, many of those same elements of nature - pines and reeds and so many more - were also incorporated into the designs. When gardens were viewed, they were understood not simply as objects of visual beauty, but as being filled with allegorical meanings drawn from poetry. These visual cues triggered in the minds of people in the garden the memory of poems they knew, and acted as catalysts in the creation of new ones. The word for poem, "uta," was the same as that for song, and poems at that time were often sung or chanted, rather than spoken. In this way, the poetic elements were like songs in the garden. The author, Marc Peter Keane, is well-known both as a garden designer and writer. Having lived 18 years in Kyoto, Japan, he brings ample first hand knowledge to the subject. "Songs in the Garden" not only describes the nature of gardens in Japan 1000 years ago, but also suggests a new paradigm for understanding what gardens can mean to us today.

Marc Peter Keane, in his remarkable set of meditative explorations, Dear Cloud, asks what if we had the ability to act on our inner urge to experience life as another person, not just hypothetically, but to actually live their lives - to be that lonely man whose chance meeting in the high-desert changes his life forever, or the new-born babe amazed at its still unfathomed world? And not just other people, but to intimately experience the unique viewpoints of other forms of life on this planet - an ancient cedar struck by lightning, a cheetah out for blood. And going even further, to delve into the spirit of place and occupy the inanimate - a tide pool, the mirror surface of a pond. Mixing a devoted naturalist's awe with what seems almost shamanic insight, seasoned with inspired and delightfully wry big-picture matter-of-factness, Dear Cloud comprises fascinatingly detailed observations and unexpected realizations about the world we live in. These thoughts take the form of letters sent home by a shape-changing protagonist who slips seamlessly between various identities, experiencing both the profound physical solitariness of every existence, and paradoxically, their absolute interconnectedness.