In a lovely melding of word and image, Williams and Frank approach that backside of the heart from four elemental directions: from the hot, rocky desert earth; from the sweet sweep of the Rio Colorado; from the seduction and the shock of a fire fed in the night; and from the heady impossibilities of air. Williams takes great risks with her prose in this book, stepping straight into erotic territory with her revelations, allowing the full passion of her desire for and in a place to burn through, while Mary Frank's sketches and paintings also step into dangerous landscapes, revealing the power of the body in space.

Passion is indeed a dangerous world. It is the fire that flames inside of us when we are adolescents, the power and possibility that is mocked when we are teens, and the erotic substance that we learn to submerge in our adult lives. By and large, polite American society shuns the honest expression of desire of any sort; ironically, our culture abounds with sexual images, but these are the images of object, not of subject -- distanced from the reality of our own bodies.

But what does this have to do with the environment, and why would a well-known naturalist write such an erotic text?

I would offer the argument that the same passion that fuels our erotics of the body also fuels our relationship to place, that fundamentally, it is a physical intimacy that links us with the earth, and by which we can understand her. Desert Quartet is the logical extension of David Abram's thesis in The Spell of the Sensuous: if the earth is the matter that gives our souls and bodies definition, and if our primary relationship with the earth is a perceptual one, then it is logical that she is also the root and the first call of desire.

Most authors shun making the extension, at least in print. When we step into passionate territory, we run the risk of losing our audiences; in a society that is so obsessed with the "objective lens," any passionate expression is dangerous territory. Whether that passion is about saving a place, preserving a forest, or making love, it is too easily marked as "unseemly" and cast aside.

But passionless, we will accomplish next to nothing. Who wants to live in a pale, neutral world? Such a world is not a world of the desert, the river, or the wind -- it is a world of mowed lawns and tedious office buildings, of giant factories and single-crop fields. It is a dead world. If we are passionless, we will forget what we gives us breath, what gives us desire -- we will become the object rather than the subject of desire, we will be lost to ourselves. And we will not prevent the earth around us from being annihilated, because we will not feel it happen.

If instead we can take the risks of again identifying our souls with our bodies, and our bodies with the land, then we will seek to preserve her, to embrace her, to rejoin with her. We will protect her because we will feel every touch, we will be immersed in her moment, her moments will be our desire. If we fight the great escape and instead re-embody ourselves, then we will stand on the land, in the land, flesh to her flesh, and we will know the backside of the heart. Her heart, our heart. Desire and life and passion flowing earth to human and back again, the circle complete.

Desert Quartet is exactly such an embodiment. Out of its pages pour the richness of the felt human experience, of the moments of the earth and of the flesh. It is a love song to the land, it is the belly of desire. It is enspelled by the sensuousness of our earth.