Journal of Curriculum Theorizing ♦ Volume 28, Number 1, 2012 260 REVIEWS Learning How to Love the World Richmond and Snowber’s Landscapes of Aesthetic Education KARIN H. DEGRAVELLES Episcopal High School of Baton Rouge To think through things, that is the still life painter’s work—and the poet’s. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon. A language of ideas is, in itself, a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time. We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations. (Doty, 2001, p. 10, emphasis in original) HE POETRY AND PROSE of Mark Doty overflow with remarkable relationships to worldly things: objects, places, animals, and art. To Doty (2001), these “material presences” can be teachers; the life we find in the poetry and paintings that represent them can serve as “evidence that a long act of seeing can translate into something permanent, both of ourselves and curiously impersonal, sturdy, useful” (p. 70). While Doty’s poetry is also populated with people, ideas, and beautiful language, it is his engagement with the material world that makes me return to his work again and again. When I do, I find that I encounter the places and things in my own world differently. A lemon is not just a lemon anymore. The stories of objects and places and the subtleties of human relationships to plants and animals are a bit more evident, or I’m a bit more inclined to search for them. Doty’s poetry reminds me that our aesthetic engagements with art, nature, and place can teach us “how to love the world” (p. 10) and that the teaching is ongoing. In Landscapes of Aesthetic Education, Stuart Richmond and Celeste Snowber (2009) explore how aesthetic experiences can help us learn how to love the world, both in schools and in our everyday lives. The thirteen essays contained in the book provide insights into the theory and practice of aesthetic education as well as reflections on how the two artist-educators experience the aesthetic in their own lives and incorporate aesthetics into their teaching, mentoring, research, and art. Essays alternate between those authored by Snowber, a dancer and poet, and by Richmond, a photographer with a particular interest in medieval buildings; both are arts education professors at Simon Fraser University. 1 Both authors draw on varied forms in these essays, interweaving poetry and narrative with theory and analysis. Their distinctly different