Thursday, September 19, 2024

The Offing *****

The OffingThe Offing by Benjamin Myers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Offing reminded me a bit of another favorite, A Month in the Country, its emphasis on the English countryside and the arts discovered by young Robert Appleyard, the son of a coal miner, who has left school and is tramping through the byways of the seaside towns to the south, sleeping rough and picking up odd jobs after the war. He meets Dulcie Piper, an opinionated nature buff thrice his age, motherly and foul-mouthed, who lives in a shabby cottage surrounded by overgrown weeds. Many of those weeds she uses to concoct nettle tea and imaginative meals. The boy stays on in an abandoned shed at night watching the dipping shadow-shapes of bats chasing moths, (while) field mice carved the tiniest curving tunnelled run through the grass, and a barn owl watched on silently from its treetop promontory." He works to improve her land while she teaches him to read poetry, imparting her bohemian thoughts and independent philosophy, pointing out "the drab municipal buildings being constructed from cheap concrete. (By) Men, mainly. Where once we built towers to heaven, now we build frumpy sweatboxes for pen-pushers...The janitors of mediocrity. The custodians of drab and peddlers of dreck. We live in chaos and out of chaos comes war." Robert finds a mysterious poetry manuscript in the old shed which he learns was written by Dulcie's late lover, an esteemed poet. What happened to her? Myers has created a lyrical and lovely text about two disparate people forming a lasting friendship: "sitting here now by the open window, a glissando of birdsong on the very lightest of breezes that carries with it the scent of a final incoming summer. I cling to poetry as I cling to life." Me, too.

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Thursday, September 5, 2024

Broken Open

Broken OpenBroken Open by Martha Gies
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Martha Gies writes a spellbinding tale of experiences in her itinerant life plus stories of the equally fascinating souls she met along the way. Whether assisting Great Kramien the Magician in his act, studying with Raymond Carver, interviewing graveyard shift workers when driving cab (see her first book Up All Night), or talking to an ex-Black Panther father or a nuclear physicist, she speaks wisely and compassionately interviews her subjects with a bit of humor for herself. It is very much a Northwest book describing growing up on an asparagus farm worked by hundreds of braceros when the U. S. welcomed and documented foreign workers and the author's myriad jobs in different parts of Oregon and Washington and farther afield. The writing is polished, as one might expect from a writing teacher, but also hones exquisite recollections: "the thousands of stars above the Andes suggesting a white blaze just behind the perforated sky; the afternoon I bent among dense ferns to ladle clear, bubbling spring water into my pail and discovered the pink pearlescent shock of a large abalone shell left by a recent guest." She includes a passionate telling of her own spiritual journey preaching to county jail inmates, and her eventual conversion to Catholicism, work with the homeless and visits to pastoral ministries in Latin America. No humdrum moments in Gies' life tales--I highly recommend this collection.

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