A Book of Seasons (Mercer University Press, 2026), Ron Balthazor’s medley of meditations on Georgia Piedmont ecology, makes for an engrossing hymnal to nature regardless of the reader’s religious subscription. Plot may not take the fore in such a beautiful panorama, but this allows Balthazor’s prose to pulse and squirm even more vividly with the sublime and transcendental birth-rot-rebirth cycles of small farm life.

From the dreaded university literature classroom to the independent southern bookstore, I’ve often been disappointed in the overwhelming anthropomorphisms and anthropocentrisms marking most American nature and ecology writers. Thank the Lord that Balthazor’s prose fights both tendencies in anthropo-unsettling measure, even if he can’t resist attributing a sanctus to every beesong or “finding biblical characters under every rock”: 

Though I have often been cautioned by my science-leaning loved ones about anthropomorphizing, I can find no better words than grace, wisdom, and love when describing this natural phenomenon. If the twentieth-century theologians are right and God is best imagined as wholly other than human, then perhaps we should look to a greener grace and thus find ourselves in a more sacred economy. (15–16)

As such, Balthazor’s prose doesn’t concern itself with superimposing the human mind and form over nature and divinity but by humbling ourselves in the everyday sublimity of ecology, living and working within—not against—the grain of nature. Or as Andy Irwin explains in the foreword, “Many people of faith eschew the natural for the unseen supernatural. Ron’s abiding faith resides in the sacred mysteries of the natural.” Balthazor wishes us to commune with nature in and beyond the page, unadulterated by human pretenses to knowledge, domination, and control—even if Balthazor’s grasp of ecology and biology often stuns. Delightfully, human perception and conceptual thought take a back seat when we meditate on what those gloriously interconnected “saplings see.” May Cormac McCarthy rest more comfortably in his grave knowing that the sublimity of southern forests remains as well represented in Balthazor’s work as in Outer Dark and The Orchard Keeper.

Balthazor’s prose doesn’t concern itself with superimposing the human mind and form over nature and divinity but by humbling ourselves in the everyday sublimity of ecology.

Akin to The Last of Us’s and Brokeback Mountain’s necessary and overdue intersection of country and LGBT+ culture, A Book of Seasons stands at another much-needed crossroads between country life, heterodox spirituality, and ecological awareness and mindfulness. After all, the narrator—an erudite farmer as well-read as the protagonist of Stephen King’s 1922, though far more compassionate—would smile and remind us that “‘pagan’ really just means ‘country,’ and truth to tell, I am a country boy.” Nestled deep in (mostly Christian, though occasionally Celtic, Norse, and related) mysticisms, Balthazor’s green perennial philosophy nevertheless can’t help but flirt with Ātman, Tao, and Śūnyatā. The narrator names one of his farm pups Zen, and even Meister Eckhart—debatably the most Zen-leaning Catholic in all of medieval mysticism—receives a few lines. Balthazor may only have eyes for his true loves, Leopold and Thoreau and the Bible, but he brushes often with the bodhisattvas and Sen no Rikyūs of the world. And though further into the book we discuss, for instance, the tulsi plant’s significance in Hinduism and comparisons between Bodhi and oak trees, readers may find themselves a wee bit peckish for more words from the non-Western world. Compare a fine line such as, “I think of my neighbor, who had an abundance of downed wood and who welcomed the bounty of squash and beans in exchange. Layer upon layer of giving and receiving out of the abundance generated by green,” with the famous phrase echoing across the Upanishads: “From fullness, fullness comes. / When fullness is taken / From fullness, / Fullness still remains.” The two texts—one millennia old, the other penned this year or last—are practically cousin philosophies, and one can’t help but pine after their close-but-no-cigar marriage (or love affair) in Balthazor’s beautiful prose. Beyond spirituality, however, to speak of natural abundance is to speak of its growing antipode in the budding Anthropocene, constituting the critical third avenue in Balthazor’s textual crossroads: ecological mindfulness in the midst of climate crisis.

If grief is the price we pay for love, then climate action is how we love and fight for our still very much alive loved ones in the green world.

God’s green earth has never been in such critical danger as today, at halftime in the early twenty-first century. The Georgia Piedmont farmer-gardener stands on the front lines of climate warming and relentless overdevelopment; thus, it makes all too much sense that Balthazor’s prose contains mournful interstices between praise of the forest’s miraculously interdependent and reciprocal economy, reflecting a southern ecology under assault from a litany of cop cities, data centers, and detention centers/human warehouses in the wake of a Trump-eviscerated Environmental Protection Agency. Industrial woodcutters’ and pests’ widening territories in the warming climate pepper the chapters and remind readers of the growing fire this time. If grief is the price we pay for love, then climate action—in the Senate and street as well as the farm and garden—is how we love and fight for our still very much alive loved ones in the green world. Balthazor’s narrator thus engages in multiple strategies to conserve his humble Piedmont patch, among them water conservation, soil restoration, composting, mulching, cover crops, drip irrigation, a Hamlet-esque recycling of birth-rot-rebirth. Such practices undertaken with a deep spirituality as well as concrete lovingkindness for the natural world prove priceless today and tomorrow. Take note, small farmers, gardeners, and wannabe green thumbs (myself among the latter).

In the final reckoning, Balthazor’s narration defies quick classification. What is A Book of Seasons? A transcendentalist-mystic-gardener’s commonplace book suffused with epistolary-like journal entries? A seasonal slideshow composed of poetry, prose, and poetry prose? Nonfiction and fiction, both and neither? A delicious Thoreau-Leopold fanfiction? Or perhaps all the above melted into a meditative mirage of everyday environmental miracles. The resulting book winds a clock with twelve months resounding every hour on the hour, a verdant “Eternity in an hour.” What more can one say beyond praise for the green world between and beyond the bindings of this beautiful hymnal to nature?

Georgia State University