WAIST DEEP IN BLACK WATER

Concise forays into the heart of places scattered throughout the Americas and within his family’s history, from poet Lane (Weed Time, not reviewed).

These self-contained essays follow Lane as he takes in passing landscapes as well as his home one in the South Carolina piedmont. If he is afield—visiting a medicine wheel in Wyoming, the edenic granite inselbergs of Suriname, a waterway thick with crocodiles in Mexico—he bones up on the place’s literature, ever wary that it’s someone else’s imagination at work (“the imagination, I fear, is not as immediate as walking a stretch of good, hard country that’s new to you”). He tries to get into a place intuitively, to hunt and gather his won reactions, happy to know, say, about the Mayan sense of time (“Circles revolving within larger circles, some with a radius of 54,000 years”) but not disappointed when he can’t slip into the mindset. Around his home patch, he is eager to understand its “watershed thinking,” Gary Snyder’s approach, vulnerable to its visceral impact. He fights to preserve a Girl Scout camp, 56 acres of wilderness—within the confines of a city limit—that holds an endangered species: the dwarf-flowered heartleaf, which “like Camp Mary Elizabeth, flourishes only as long as it does not push up into the light.” There’s a slow poke down a local piedmont stream, where Lane is stung by “the darkest nostalgia when I see the bricked-up windows of the old mill,” and there are slow ambles into the brittle emotional landscape of family: “My father’s death placed me psychologically: I am the son of a suicide. I live in a place of abandonment . . . the weather is never predictable.”

Lane has a fluid eye in “a world where time moves in more than one direction and no landscape holds steady for long,” and it’s energizing to see through that eye, open as it is to both light and darkness.