An unusual, fact-filled appreciation of the natural world blended with ventures into mysticism.
In the second installment (Secret Voices: The West, 2012) of her mystical nature series, New Mexico-based author Merrill profiles several varieties of trees found on the North American midcontinent, categorizing them regionally and offering herself as their translator.
For each tree she explores, Merrill offers several components—a rich illustration followed by a first-person monologue personifying the tree and what lesson it would teach humans if that American Elm or Boxelder could speak our language. She also provides drawings and explanations of other animal and plant species that share the tree’s habitat. A compatible poem written by Brian Mitchell accompanies each entry. The overall aesthetic effect is accessible and pleasing, but the combination of informed nature writing with the work’s fantastical elements, which depart wholly from realism, may be challenging for some readers. To add to the unusual mix, the author salts the text with memorable factoids; e.g., “rabbits burrow, hares live above ground; rabbits are born blind and furless, hares are born fully furred, eyes open.” Such details show the writer’s expertise, which may persuade more concrete nature-loving readers to at least consider her forays into mystical and even mythical worlds. These forays center on the author’s “readings” of trees, which Merrill offers as an alternative term for the wackier sounding “talks” to the trees. She describes her own method of communication with them as follows: “I ask a series of questions, the ‘answers’ come as images, emotions or concepts, often wordless....Then I turn it all into prose that (hopefully) hangs together.” Such “readings” offer insights into the organism’s past lives and thought processes and often touch on reincarnation; e.g., the sumac dreams of being “part of a chorus of ladies reaching for the Moon, waving and dancing as it passes overhead,” and the spruce recalls once being a glacier or polar bear.
An unusual, fact-filled appreciation of the natural world blended with ventures into mysticism.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9848299-2-7
Page Count: 177
Publisher: Myth & Magic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
That sense of joy infuses these gentle essays. “Old age sits in a chair,” writes Hall, “writing a little and diminishing.”...
The writing life at age 85.
In this collection of 14 autobiographical essays, former U.S. Poet Laureate Hall (Christmas at Eagle Pond, 2012, etc.) reflects on aging, death, the craft of writing and his beloved landscape of New Hampshire. Debilitated by health problems that have affected his balance and ability to walk, the author sees his life physically compromised, and “the days have narrowed as they must. I live on one floor eating frozen dinners.” He waits for the mail; a physical therapist visits twice a week; and an assistant patiently attends to typing, computer searches and money matters. “In the past I was often advised to live in the moment,” he recalls. “Now what else can I do? Days are the same, generic and speedy….” Happily, he is still able to write, although not poetry. “As I grew older,” he writes, “poetry abandoned me….For a male poet, imagination and tongue-sweetness require a blast of hormones.” Writing in longhand, Hall revels in revising, a process that can entail more than 80 drafts. “Because of multiple drafts I have been accused of self-discipline. Really I am self-indulgent, I cherish revising so much.” These essays circle back on a few memories: the illness and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, which sent him into the depths of grief; childhood recollections of his visits to his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, where he helped his grandfather with haying; grateful portraits of the four women who tend to him: his physical therapist, assistant, housekeeper and companion; and giving up tenure “for forty joyous years of freelance writing.”
That sense of joy infuses these gentle essays. “Old age sits in a chair,” writes Hall, “writing a little and diminishing.” For the author, writing has been, and continues to be, his passionate revenge against diminishing.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0544287044
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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