Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft - Rilegato

Pendell, Dale

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1556438877 ISBN 13: 9781556438875

Casa editrice: North Atlantic Books, 2009

Riassunto

This is the first volume of North Atlantic Books’ hardcover edition of Dale Pendell'sPharmako trilogy, an encyclopedic study of the history and uses of psychoactive plants and related synthetics first published between 1995 and 2005. The books form an interrelated suite of works that provide the reader with a unique, reliable, and often personal immersion in this medically, culturally, and spiritually fascinating subject. All three books are beautifully designed and illustrated, and are written with unparalleled authority, erudition, playfulness, and range.

Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft focuses on familiar psychoactive plant-derived substances and related synthetics, ranging from the licit (tobacco, alcohol) to the illicit (cannabis, opium) and the exotic (absinthe, salvia divinorum, nitrous oxide). Each substance is explored in detail, not only with information on its history, pharmacology, preparation, and cultural and esoteric correspondences, but also the subtleties of each plant's effect on consciousness in a way that only poets can do. The whole concoction is sprinkled with abundant quotations from famous writers, creating a literary brew as intoxicating as its subject.

The Pharmako series is continued in Pharmako/Dynamis (focusing on stimulants and empathogens) andPharmako/Gnosis (which addresses psychedelics and shamanic plants).

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Recensione:

"Dale Pendell reactivates the ancient connection between the bardic poet and the shaman. His Pharmako/Poeia is a litany to the secret plant allies that have always accompanied us along the alchemical trajectory that leads to a new and yet authentically archaic future."
—Terence McKenna, author of True Hallucinations

"Much of our life-force calls upon the plant world for support, in medicines and in foods, as both allies and teachers. Pendell provides a beautifully crafted bridge between these two worlds. The magic he shares is that the voices are spoken and heard both ways; we communicate with plants and they with us. This book is a moving and poetic presentation of this dialogue."
—Dr. Alexander T. Shulgin, University of California at Berkeley, Department of Public Health

"Pharmako/Poeia is an epic poem on plant humours, an abstruse alchemic treatise, an experiential narrative jigsaw puzzle, a hip and learned wild-nature reference text, a comic paean to cosmic consciousness, an ecological handbook, a dried-herb pastiche, a counterculture encyclopedia of ancient fact and lore that cuts through the present ‘conservative’ war-on-drugs psychobabble."
—Allen Ginsberg, poet

"Dale Pendell’s remarkable book will make it impossible to ever again underestimate the most unprepossessing plant. This compendium of how-to-get-high-by-eating-your-lawn ethnological data is mind-boggling, useful, and serves as a fine end run around the guardians of ‘official’ consciousness."
—Peter Coyote, actor

L'autore:

Plant student Dale Pendell established himself as one of the foremost popular exponents of shamanic ethnobotany with his unprecedentedPharmako trilogy. A noted poet, he was the founding editor of the avant-garde magazineKuksu and a co-founder of the Primitive Arts Institute and has led workshops on ethnobotany and ethnopoetics for the Naropa Institute and the Omega Institute. Pendell was part of the Oracular Madness theme camp at Burning Man for a number of years (his book Inspired Madness: The Gifts of Burning Man was published by Frog Books in 2006). Also an experienced computer scientist, he lives in California's Sierra foothills.

Foreword author Gary Snyder is well known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Beat-era associate of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and as a pioneering environmental thinker and activist.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: North Atlantic Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1556438877
• ISBN 13: 9781556438875
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 287