SHADOWS IN MY HANDS

An elliptically told journey to selfhood through a landscape of transcendent beauty, lyrically evoked by a recipient of two Western Heritage Awards for her writing. In loosely sequential but self-contained essays, Coleman (Stories from Mesa Country, 1991, etc.) describes how early visits to the Southwest—where she ``set out to learn the people, the mysteries, with the unwitting help of an old man, Archie, grandson of pioneer settlers''—would ultimately change her life. There, the author ``forged a bond'' with this old man in a place where ``the mountains turned crimson in the twilight and the months of summer shimmered in the sun.'' Every year she returned with her family ``to its people, its horses, its clear beauty high in the mountains loved above all others; the place that for six years and in the absence of another, I called home.'' Coleman participated fully in the life there: rounding up cattle from mountain pastures, helping brand them, and driving trucks. Later, when her marriage broke up, she acknowledged that she'd become ``an uncomprehending victim of psychological and verbal abuse'' who'd nonetheless ``managed to preserve the core of self'' where she existed. She walked out of her house, pointed her car toward the West, and—with grants to research the life of Mattie Earp, second wife of Wyatt—traveled through the small towns of the region, then rented `` `Rancho Milagro,' Miracle Ranch'' in Arizona—a ``place that is the essence of timelessness.'' But the author's journey reached its apogee on the desolate ranch she finally bought, a ``place of instant recognition.'' There, she settled, ``put down roots, planted trees and a garden,'' and wrote ``the words that demand release.'' At times mannered but redeemed by Coleman's fierce—and eloquently expressed—love for a place of austere beauty and the ``thunderous presence of the natural world.''