Books by Reg Darling
Books by Reg Darling
Hartwell Road: A Review by Dan R. Talley

Powerful and perceptive, this wandering contemplation is a celebration of our hunter-gatherer heritage and a passionate call not merely for its preservation, but for its renewal. Darling explores the meaning of wildness in the Alleghenies, the tundra of the far north, the marshes along the Chesapeake Bay, and the inner terrain of the human spirit.
“Let’s make offerings to the creatures of the forest and pray to the ravens. Wild meat will nourish us without clogging our arteries or our souls. We will laugh and weep and sweat. We will drink from the spring of our original freedom. Only our skills can get us there. We must invent a new and ancient way of relating to the world. We are an endangered species. Failure is not one of our options.”
Coyote Soul, Raven Heart

This book will likely induce tears as it transports you through reflections on the connections and losses in your own life - a process at once painful and glorious. This is a book that will speak directly to the non-conforming spirits of the baby-boom generation - especially as we navigate the mounting upheavals and uncertainties of the 21st Century and come to grips with our own impending mortality.
While Hartwell Road sometimes seems exotic and foreign, we round the bend and realize it is the same road that we too have been walking, only seen from a slightly different and meticulously well-rendered point of view.
- Dan R. Talley is an arts administrator, curator, and critic who has been involved in the making, exhibiting, and analysis of contemporary art for over 30 years. He is a practicing vegetarian and a long-time animal rights advocate who, nonetheless, finds Darling’s sensitive and deeply felt philosophy about the order of nature strangely compatible with his own.