NONFICTION - July 19, 1992

LETTERS FROM A WILD STATE: Rediscovering Our True Relationship With Nature by James G. Cowan (Bell Tower: $18; 138 pp.) Religion scholar Henry Corbin called it the “interworld”--the imaginative, spiritual life in which man is a part of nature, not an invader or conqueror. James G. Cowan’s “Letters From a Wild State” is an exploration of the interworld as it manifests itself in the writer’s native Australia, and although the book will be too New Age for many, it has a few good moments. The book contains, for one thing, a wonderful creation tale in which the treetop-dwelling Kadimakara created the desert--and inadvertently annihilated themselves--by descending to the earth to eat its fruits until nothing edible remained. The Australian tribesmen who witnessed the destruction of their earthly paradise now call the sky, once obscured by leafy foliage, Pura Wilpanina-- the Great Hole. Much of “Letters From a Wild State,” however, is a routine plea for man’s unity with nature, and only the Australian setting and referents make it unusual. Cowan, a poet and folklorist, is banging a familiar popular-myth drum when he writes that “By desacralising history we have at last made sense of it, since we now comprehend where we are going. Nowhere, if the truth be known!”