Stone Bridge Press is happy to share that Of Arcs and Circles, a new collection of essays by Marc Peter Keane, a Japanese Garden Designer and author of Japanese Garden Design books The Japanese Tea Garden, The Art of Setting Stones, and others is now available everywhere.
From his vantage point as a garden designer and writer based in Kyoto, Marc Peter Keane examines the world around him and delivers astonishing insights through an array of narratives.
How the names of gardens reveal their essential meaning. A new definition of what art is. What trees are really made of. The true meaning of the enigmatic torii gate found at Shinto shrines. Why we give flowers as gifts. The essential, underlying unity of the world.
Marc Peter Keane, a landscape architect and a leading expert on Japanese garden design, focuses on gardens not only from an aesthetic point of view, but also (like poetry, sculpture and painting) as allegorical compositions.
Over the past 20 years, he has designed and built numerous gardens for private residences, businesses and temples, ranging from a 1200-sq.-ft. tea garden to a 6-acre park. Keane's interest in historic preservation led to his creation of an award-winning master plan for the redesign of a historic district in Nagano, Japan. Omega Point, his installation for the 2000 Kyoto Arts Festival, won the Grand Prize that year.
Praise
"This isn’t a book to be devoured as one does a bag of potato chips. Each essay requires time and peace, and rereading, to connect with its essential views, which may hide lessons of a very surprising sort." —Rebecca Otowa, Writers in Kyoto "For a thoughtful romp through Kyoto’s aesthetic delights—from the utterly mundane to the exquisitely ineffable—I can’t think of a better guide than Marc Peter Keane. I highly recommend his newest volume, Of Arcs and Circles." —Leonard Koren, author of Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers "Maybe it comes from years of working with gardens, paying attention to the twist of one branch, the spread of a patch of moss. Marc Keane notices things. He really looks. It might be a wasp nest, an old machiya being torn down, the wind in the trees, a dragonfly that landed on his finger. He looks, and his thoughts begin to swim, then fly, then swoop back down again, in cycle upon cycle, always returning to the inter-connectedness and impermanence — the wonder — of things." —Alex Kerr, author of Finding the Heart Sutra