Overview

In Red Dreams, Volcano Visions, award-winning author, Kathryn Waddell Takara, PhD, presents contemporary ecological and environment issues in a context of a volcanic eruption. Her aim is to elevate the consciousness from a moral desert of conscience and caring to a level of awareness to transform the abuse of magnificent Nature to another level of respect for life, sustenance, and a healing of the earth. In her poetry, Takara includes Hawaiian mythology, startling photos, disquieting red lava flows and the daily community losses of land, homes, and livelihood. Some speculate that the destruction was caused by ignorance, irreverence for the sacred land and its power, and the greed of the developers who sold land on a high risk rift zone. Takara likewise illuminates the reader about Hawai`i and its people, Kanaka Maole, their spiritual traditions, history, continuing reverence for Nature, and the significance of the ancestral memories, legends, and myths on contemporary culture and life styles. Takara's subtext is a commentary on the climate crisis and dire situation and conditions of our earth. She observes the relationship between man and Nature and the unpredictable and predictable consequences of abuse. She includes philosophical and metaphysical questions of identity, conscience and transformation. She witnesses the neo-colonial and colonial geologies and geographies of resistance and the psychological effects of loss and restoration in a social context of race, class, and culture. Her message: we must get right with the earth.

Full Product Details

9780999303948

Table of Contents

Reviews

In Red Dreams Volcano Visions, Kathryn Waddell Takara takes us through the sounds, sensations, and emotions of the 2018 eruption. We stand with her on rumbly ground, watching with humbling awe the unprecedented explosions, both geological and human. Each line nudges us closer to Pele, the community, and ultimately, the question, 'What is sacred and not?' Catherine Kalama Becker, Mana Cards: The Power of Hawaiian Wisdom and curator of Pele and the Puna Lava Flow. Kathryn speaks of the volcano as though she knows it. I do too. I witnessed the 1959 birth of this volcano within a volcano. For the first time, in reading Kathryn's newest book, I feel my experience has been truly described. Kathryn's innate talent at story telling makes this volume a compelling reading companion. - Alxandra Avery, writer I soon found myself on the Big Island, caught up in a world of unpredictable dangers, infused with a paradoxical mood in which fear and alarm rubbed shoulders with awesome glory. Wow! ... I imagine enduring that 'stay or leave' tug of war that ensues when ties to home exert their pull, while fears of injury and death push hard from behind... when you consciously don't know what will happen next or how bad it will get before it's finally over. Surely living with an ongoing volcanic eruption going off in your backyard calls forth another set of contrasts too... the adrenalin-pumping hyperawareness of living moment to moment, and the enervating stress and fatigue that wear one to the bone... building up and breaking down as the dance of yin and yang create the ever-changing world, within and without. Katherine Shelley Orr, Author, environmentalist. Kathryn, I am so glad I read your book. I found your artistic blend of legend, present day stories, emotional insights and poetry brings my experience of the 2018 Puna eruption to a new, more spiritual level. Thank you for your talents. I hope many others sit down with Red Dreams Volcano Visions for an amazing journey. Harry Durgin, Photographer, Resident of the Puna District

Author Information

Kathryn Waddell Takara, PhD, is the author of nine books of poetry, a biography, and a collection of oral histories. In 2010, she was honored with with the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Takara is the owner and publisher of Pacific Raven Press, LLC, which has published 18 titles. She is a recognized scholar, celebrated intellectual, and performance artist. Takara's global travels are reflected in her work as footprints, phantasms, and wings to self-development, consciousness, and a call to conscience. Born and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama in the Jim Crow era, Takara is a long time resident of Hawai`i. Retired, she was an Associate Professor at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, where she developed and taught courses in African American and African history, politics, literature, and culture. During her tenure, she organized major conferences on a variety of African American, Black Diaspora, and minority issues, inviting national and international scholars to participate. . Takara earned her PhD in Political Science and an MA in French. An instructor of college-level French for over 10 years, she has given poetry readings in Bordeaux, France; Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire; and Niamey, Niger. In May 2017, she traveled to China for the eighth time to lecture and perform her poetry at Qingdao University and Beijing University of Foreign Studies. She has appeared in television programs and documentary films, and has given frequent interviews to publications and the media.

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