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There's a song that Alistair Brown sings that always moves me. In Jamestown the ship's crew sing of “the wild delight of a sailor homeward bound” after being at sea for three years. They urge each other on, anticipating their welcome. But the line that makes me catch my breath is when they arrive and friends and family crowd around saying, “Welcome, Columbia's mariners, to your home and liberty.”

We're talking about a time long ago when the country was young and wooden ships sailed the oceans, so the equating of the United States with liberty has the naive freshness of the days when the country stood as a beacon of freedom. However, the simple pride I felt in my country as a child has long been undercut by the realisation that those same founding fathers who bewailed the tyranny of England were themselves slave owners. Liberty, of course, was only for white men.

This Young Adult book was first recommended to me by Lesley, a children's librarian. Since then, others have mentioned how good it is. I found it a little hard to get into, since the language is archaic and the opening situation unclear. For many chapters, I was uncertain of the time period, and whether I was reading a fantasy novel or a depiction of the real world. Even knowing as much as I do of the eighteenth century craze for natural science and the odd enclaves of amateur enthusiasts, I was confused. The explanation was a long time coming and only the short chapters and faith in Lesley's judgment kept me reading.

Set in Boston in the 1760s, Octavian lives with his mother in a house dedicated to the pursuit of science. The amateur philosopher-scientists of the Novanglian College, led by Mr. Gitney, pursue many odd experiments and also tutor Octavian who is treated like a little prince. After all, his mother was a princess in Africa. Dressed in silks and satins and petted by all, he is given a classical education and music lessons. It is some time before he realises that other little boys, whether prince or urchin, do not have to measure and weigh their excrement to compare intake and output. Eventually he becomes aware that he and his mother are themselves are not only slaves, but also the subjects of experiments to prove the inferiority of the African race.

Anderson says in the endnote that he wanted to write about this seminal period in history from the point of view of someone who doesn't know how it will turn out. I find that idea fascinating. Caught up in a moment of cultural change, as I remember quite well from 1968, you can sense possibilities opening up that you never dreamed of, even as you fear that what you're experiencing is just a momentary blip. How much more interesting, then, to look at this historic moment from the point of view of an outsider.

I'm surprised that the book is considered appropriate for teens and impressed that it is so popular. The language, which is similar to that of other eighteenth century novels, is difficult and unwelcoming. The vivid descriptions of abuses visited upon slaves cannot but horrify the reader. I knew that YA books had become much darker and more graphic that those of my day, but this is the stuff of nightmares. However, then I recalled that when I was eleven, I came across a book that consisted of news stories about lynchings, just one reprint after another. It was a thick book. Yes, I was horrified. Nightmares ensued. Yet with the devotion to fairness that the young possess, I became a foot soldier in the cause. It was very much due to this formative moment that I later broke with my parents over the civil rights movement.

If it takes this book a while to get going, it does eventually become absorbing, especially as the narrator grows older and understands better what is happening around him. It is a shocking book, but one that is ultimately satisfying. I will look for the next in the series and think of Octavian when I listen the sailors of the Jamestown extolling home and liberty.

The other day I walked past the house where we lived until I was five and was surprised all over again. No matter how many times I've visited it as an adult, I always forget that it is green now, not the white I remember. And the back yard that stretched an unimaginable distance now seems no more than a patch of grass with a few bushes around the edges. Even the tree that once held the bees that stung all of us during a memorable picnic lunch is gone. I remember my mother hanging sheets in that yard and how I dodged between the damp fluttering walls that made up an interminable maze. This afterthought of a yard could hardly have contained such imaginings. Could I be mistaken? Perhaps I turned down the wrong street. Perhaps my childhood never happened that way.

I experience the same trepidation when I reread books I loved when young. Bradbury met some critical need in my teenaged heart, his stories full of the ache and longing that swamped me. If the emotions were sometimes over the top, well, I knew all about that. Many of his images became part of my personal iconography: carnivals and October nights, Ohio fireflies, and lightning rods with curious markings. And, inevitably, the Mars as he imagines it to be before the men from Earth arrive.

I was afraid, coming to this book decades after my last reading, that I would find it too childish in its language, too obvious in its satire, too unrestrained in its passions. But I did not. It may be all of those things, but I did not notice, caught up as I was in the world of Bradbury's imagining. Even the smell of the pages brought back memories of another cold spring.

The story which affected me most deeply back then was the one about Spender, a member of the Fourth Expedition who found on Mars a civilisation he admired and wanted to preserve from the incursions of the loud and violent Earthmen. I finished Spender's story sitting in the back row of my English class, the paperback hidden in my grammar text. Nostalgia for a lost civilisation, a past preferable to our present, overwhelmed me and I was so moved that tears ran down my face and blotched my uniform, startling the teacher who wondered what tragedy lurked in diagramming sentences. A few years later, reading Tolkein, I found the same nostalgia, the same shimmer of the past (as Tolkein called it) adding depth to the present.

Reading it now I did not cry, but I was still moved. What most surprised me, though, was that Bradbury, writing this book that was first published in 1950, set his far-distant future in what is now for me the recent past: 1999-2005, though the last few stories take place in 2026. I found it disconcerting to think that Spender made his stand in 2001, a year I recall as devoid of manned expeditions to Mars.

Also disconcerting, and of course always a danger when predicting the future, is how far off some of Bradbury's predictions are. Not just the lack of regular taxi shuttles to the red planet, but the idea that by 2005 the Moral Climates people would have banned all literature except for the most realistic and unimaginative. Poe, the Grimm brothers, Lewis Carroll, any books deemed escapist—“All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy“—are destroyed, and filmmakers are only allowed to make versions of Hemingway stories. The idea is laughable now when the entertainment juggernaut seems unstoppable.

But then I recalled the attempts to ban the Harry Potter books for being about magic. Bradbury recognised the Puritan streak in American culture, the intrusive, I'm-going-to-decide-what's-best-for-you attitude that has become only too familiar. In contrast, his books open the mind. They are certainly worthy of being pulled off the shelf for another read.

You may not be able to go back to your childhood, but you can bring the past into today. All week I have been conscious of the shadow of my younger self, of how my life now would appear to her. It's more than a different point of view; it's a stretch that exercises an imagination grown lazy.

I ended up reading this collection four times. The first time I just enjoyed the words, the sound of them, the flow. I ignored that nagging, rational part of my mind that is always demanding to know what things mean. I just shut it up in a closet and let it rattle around and fuss while I let the words slip through my thoughts.

Lonely whitecap limpet, days are not true. You stand on one foot,

and we brush past. To live a life is not to walk across a field.

The second time I read for images, lingering over each poem and letting resonances collect in the space between them. Some images move seamlessly into the next, while others leave gaps, crevasses for the imagination to fill.

Above her

a hummingbird pivots, unsure.

Inside the girl a field of reeds, a year of hinges,

her father's boat crossing the wide water.

For the third reading I let the demanding creature out of the closet and read for meaning. The book is in two parts. The first is about a young family in an isolated town in the Pacific Northwest, about the writer learning and imagining about this family. As in a fairy tale, this family has the first child born in the town in a century, but their second child is stillborn. Precise sensual images anchor the way grief dismantles the small family.

A dictionary of smells. The kitchen of the year she'd left, scrub pines,

sassafras from the schoolyard and mossy tennis courts.

The second part takes the authors personal experiences of pregnancy, birth, work, marriage—all those essentials of life. Some of the poems are acrostics, and many have allusions to children's books and fairy tales, unsurprising fare for a new parent. The imagery here is less dense, occasionally playful. Still, even the lightest poems are informed by the images and emotions of the earlier section, the threat of loss, the awareness of just how tenuous a construct this family life can be.

The first person in recorded history

struck by a comet slept on her couch

across the road from the Comet Drive-In

The fashion these days, or so I'm told, is to construct poetry chapbooks and collections as narratives, so that the entire group falls within a single story arc. I prefer the tension that Snyder-Camp creates, where each poem stands alone, but takes on new meaning within the context of the other poems in the book.

I let everything go for my fourth reading, allowing words, images, meaning to merge into an extraordinary experience. I've found Tupelo Press to be a reliable source of outstanding poetry, and this book is no exception. I highly recommend it.

I thought about Diane Arbus as I read this book. Arbus’s work forces me to look at and pay attention to people I might otherwise avoid, my eyes sliding away, consigning them to the crowd. Having to recognise the subject as an individual is unsettling and sometimes unpleasant, but ultimately edifying as it compels me to acknowledge the person’s humanity and appreciate his or her difficulties and concerns.

Oates’s work affects me the same way. Here, she has taken the JonBenet Ramsey case as a springboard for exploring the dynamics of a family caught up in a similar maelstrom: a personal tragedy turned into a media circus. Normally I avoid such distractions, preferring not to waste my time on the viral coverage of some self-indulgent celebrity heading to rehab or some non-public figure jockeying for fame, so I didn’t follow the Ramsey case. But Oates is too good a writer to let me off the hook.

Now 19, Skylar Rampike narrates the events around the death of his younger sister almost ten years earlier. At six, little Bliss Rampike—born Edna Louise Rampike—is already an ice skating prodigy with several local titles on her resume and a promising future, when she is found murdered in the furnace room of the family home in a prosperous New Jersey suburb. Although a convicted pedophile confesses to the killing, Skylar himself is widely suspected of being the culprit.

Skylar does not spare himself. He was an unattractive child, with fly-away fawn-colored hair, and an even more unattractive adolescent. In his desperation to please his demanding parents, Skylar injures himself in a gymnastics class, leaving him with a permanent limp and a tendency to wear what his parents criticise as “his pain face”.

I would like to think that Betsey and Bix are parodies of awful parents. Betsey’s obsession with Bliss’s career is rooted in her own frustrated dreams of glory. Although an outline description of Betsey’s actions would sound like the stereotype of the worst of stage mothers, or the recently celebrated Tiger Mom, Oates fills in this image with emotion and self-deception. Bix may be idolised by his young children, but he cannot be trusted, reneging on promise after promise to his son and daughter, even as he swears that they are what matter most to him. Behind Bix’s bluster, too, are shadows of uncertainty and baffled regret, as he consistently mispronounces clichés and foreign tags.

Betsey and Bix are not parodies, unfortunately, in spite of some reviewers' complaints that they are not sufficiently complex. Too many parents believe they can lie to children and control their futures without repercussions. Such parents don’t see their children as independent beings with their own hopes and fears and dreams, but rather as extensions of themselves. Their tragedy, then, is when these parents find that the love and devotion they assumed was theirs by right is not, in fact, forthcoming.

Skylar’s voice as narrator is perfectly pitched as a small child describing outings with his mummy and daddy, as an awkward pre-teen at boarding school experiencing friendship and romance for the first time, and as a thoroughly alienated adolescent. This is Skylar’s story and it has to do with what connection such a damaged soul can find in our fractured and selfish world.

We have a poetry discussion group that meets once a month. Members take turns leading the discussion, which can mean presenting a brief introduction to the chosen poet or simply identifying a selection of poems to be discussed. As you can imagine, our tastes vary widely, and we often differ in our assessments. This disparity has been helpful to me as a writer: seeing how one person can love a poem and another hate it, learning what appeals to various people. Some of our members are poets, but not everyone. The group has also been helpful to me as a reader, introducing me to new poets, forcing me to look harder at work I might have skipped over, providing new insights into poems I thought I’d plumbed.

For this month I selected Janine Pommy Vega who was unknown to nearly everyone in our group. Since Vega passed away recently (December 2010), it seemed like a good time to look at her body of work. Also, a couple of our members teach in prisons, as Vega herself did for many years. As a teenager, Vega ran off to Greenwich Village where she met Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, among others. Her early poetry reflects this Beat influence while her later poetry often seems centered upon her work in prisons and upon the spiritual quest that took her around the world. Mad Dogs is her twelfth collection of poetry and includes work selected from earlier volumes.

As one member of our group remarked, Vega’s work is uneven: some poems are transcendent while others seem flat. The poems I selected naturally reflected my taste, which is for unexpected images knocking up against each other, leaving lots of room for ambiguity. Consequently, a few people found the poems too vague. One that many thought remarkable though obscure was “The Traveler”. With references to Plato—cave, tunnel and sky—the narrator goes “on an outing in the home/of myself”. The poem is filled with images of things that do not work and the sound of things breaking. The ending is strange and ominous: “No snow crackles under the traveler’s feet/out walking without the body, sense peeled like/an apple to the deer nibbling down the sky.”

We all liked “Re-entry” which is about the difficulty of coming back from being away. She says, “One night the body went out to find/its darkness”. It doesn’t matter where the person has been, although that didn’t stop us speculating about possibilities—prison, sleeping, a drug trip. What matters is the inability to return: “you look at photos, memories of the mind/and can’t return to the places/you might have been”. Everything seems strange: “What will you do with your hair/your nails and eyebrows/what will you do with your hair?”

“May Day”, which examines the narrator’s relationship with her mother and their shared legacy of anger, sparked a long discussion. Some of us thought the anger the two women expressed was an inchoate rage without a specific target or rationale: “ancient woman/of the earth who comes up/howling, red, her hands running with lava”. Others thought the rage was at each other and talked about women’s anger with their mothers. If that is true, the ending moves to a reconciliation: “I can’t disown her/every shred of her dress is mine”. We disagreed as to whether anger can lead to regeneration, like forest fires enabling new growth, but were united in our appreciation of the title’s resonances with pagan rituals, S.O.S. calls, and revolution.

I’m grateful to the members of our group for their insights and suggestions which led me to a deeper appreciation of these poems and Vega’s particular talent.

In her Preface, Urquhart describes these stories as her first forays into fiction. As a poet, she had begun to find that her interest in narrative and “subtle explorations of character” demanded a different, more expansive form. She says, “I found that there was not enough physical space in a single lyric poem for what I wanted to say, and not enough breadth for me to get to know what I needed to learn.” Even narrative poetry proved insufficient, and I found it amusing that her first story is about Robert Browning.

I’ve been interested in writers who work in both genres—Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Hardy, to name just a few—exploring what they choose to write as poems and what as fiction. For myself, I sometimes write a story as a poem first, or perhaps after the first draft. By identifying what in the story creates the “concentrated resonance” Joanna Hirschfield attributes to Japanese poetry, I understand better how to focus the story.

I have remarked before how poetic Urquhart’s prose is. These stories, however, hover between poetry and prose, using the syntax and imagery of poetry within the narrative structure of fiction. Her imaginative leaps and way of telling it “slant”, as Emily Dickinson famously said, result in stories that are sometimes like dreams, mysterious and moving in indefinable ways. Some of them reminded me of Italo Calvino’s cities.

Other stories experiment with shifts in time. In “Forbidden Dances”, a woman remembers visiting her grandmother, moving back and forth between childhood memories, present-day adulthood, adolescence, her grandmother’s death. Urquhart eschews the usual structure of a present-day frame containing a chronological flashback, yet I was never uncertain as to when each scene was taking place. The scenes build from the grandmother’s story to her best friend’s story and then into the narrator’s story, all of them interpenetrating and illuminating each other.

The physical setting is important too. In the grandmother’s kitchen, the south window faces the fields of the farm where she spent her adult life, fields now worked by her son, while the north window faces the hill that was the scene of her childhood. I had the sense of an entire life contained in this single room, where she sits in her rocker working at a piece of appliquéd patchwork. Outside is a small wood with a creek which fills the narrator’s imagination. Hirschfield describes some poems as having a “painterly quality, the use of outward presentation to hold inner meaning” which perfectly captures Urquhart’s accomplishment. The first book of Urquhart’s that I read was The Underpainter and her partner is an artist whom I’ve mentioned here, making the quote even more apt.

This story is also a good example of how Urquhart uses imagery and colors to build character and theme. The grandmother, whose father forbade her to dance and insisted she do needlework, spends her time embroidering ladies in pastel gowns who look as though they are preparing to go to a dance. Given her lack of skill, the narrator notes that “the stitches that held them together were unlikely to endure long enough to get them there.” The specificity of imagery and the attention to word choice in this and the other stories add to their power and demonstrate the poet’s skill.

There is a raptor circling in the woods outside, a hawk of some kind. He glides just above the trees and then loops down a little ways into them, up, around, down, up, around. And then he plunges down, swiftly, into the tangle of grey branches and underbrush.

Gale’s poems appear modest and unassuming, yet with attentive reading, they open out into stories that wrap sensuality and concern around seeds of bitterness and grief. I love the space in these poems. They are like jasmine buds that, steeped in hot water, unfurl and blossom, infusing the cup with a heady scent.

She manages to tell whole stories in a few lines. Describing a marriage in “The Tomato Picker”, she says he “could not sleep in their bed/without dreaming of the house/vanishing . . .” and we know what is happening. Many of these poems are about the shifting lines of power within relationships, women who are betrayed by their own bodies as much as by the smiling men who touch them. She uses small, yet precise details to summon emotion, such as the man in “Outside the Window” who catches his breath in fear that the woman inside will touch the hair of the man she is with, just as she once touched his.

Other poems are about teaching, about the stories students tell her, about their own fears in the classroom. I love “My Children are Not Fig Trees” in which she answers the question as to why she does not write poems about her children. She describes caring for fig trees, vegetables, pansies. However, of her children, she merely says, “I hold my breath./I listen to their breathing.” In just two lines, she has captured the whole of my approach to parenting. Amazing.

I picked up the book at the AWP Conference, from the Red Hen Press table. Normally I do not purchase books on the basis of what company published it, but when it comes to poetry and Red Hen Press, I can be pretty sure that I will like the book.

The poem that moved me the most was “Snakes and Hawks”. After an evening with her lover, the narrator wakes to moonlight. From the doorway, she looks back at his boa constrictor and his chained hawk. As she walks outside, she thinks, “only my own body/does not leave me” and it is as if all those lazy, looping circles about coconut ice cream and Thai beer and his pets were a distraction, a preparation, and here is the plunge, and it goes straight to the heart of the matter.

I’m finding the Writer’s Almanac to be a fertile source of reading material. Through it, I’ve learned about many little-known authors, or authors like Jameson who were famous in their day but unknown now. In her long life (1891-1986), Jameson wrote over 45 novels and served as President of the London center of the P.E.N., the first woman to do so. Her first aim in writing this autobiography in the early 1960s is to capture the tumultuous times through which she has lived. Her second aim is to discover for herself “what sort of person I have been,” acknowledging that nothing would be easier than to fabricate, using only the facts of her life, a portrait which would be “intelligent, charming, interesting and a lie” but choosing sincerity instead. The resulting narrative sometimes suffers from this lack of a throughline, but captures the vitality of life as we live it: a jumble from beginning to end, sprinkled with mistakes, false starts, and moments of unreasoning joy.

I’m reading some of her novels, but it is really this autobiography that captivates me. The book clearly conveys the image of a strong-minded woman who is not afraid to admit her mistakes or to admonish others for theirs. Impervious to advice, bull-headed, Storm barges her way through life, making—and often suffering from—her own decisions. For example, as a young woman, she gives in to her mother’s loneliness and refuses a prestigious London job writing for The Egoist, a position that is then offered to Rebecca West, who of course went on to literary fame and a place in the canon. Still, Jameson says, “Believe me, who should know, The Egoist and the world of letters got a better bargain.”

Her native Whitby is her great love, though restlessness repeatedly drives her to London and abroad. Being an admirer of that Yorkshire town myself, I was charmed by her descriptions of the town of her childhood at the end of the era of shipbuilding that supported her family and Whitby itself. Her relationship with her mother is as eccentric as everything else in her orbit. Acting almost as a bashful lover, she cannot resist giving expensive gifts to the perpetually dissatisfied woman. Twice married, Jameson later solves the parenting dilemma by boarding her young son with a woman outside Whitby while she herself lives in London, working and writing.

Jameson’s acerbic comments on writers and publishers whom she knew make me wish she’d expanded those sections. Many of them I’d never heard of and am now looking up. At one point she describes a meeting with John Middleton Murray, which gave me a start because I’ve also been reading Katherine Mansfield’s letters, spacing them out so I can savor them. I was shocked to realise the two women were contemporaries. Somehow I hadn’t made the connection.

The tale Jameson tells avoids bathos and hand-wringing; she’s too tough for that. Yet when, for example, her rage over the waste of the Great War slips out, it is profoundly moving. Moving, too, is her chagrin at having been too self-centered to appreciate her brother, killed just before the Armistice, while she had him.

Another section which brought me to tears was her visit to Prague in June of 1938 as a delegate to the P.E.N. Congress, just after Hitler’s invasion of Vienna. The Czech people she meets display a heart-breaking confidence that England will honor its promise to protect them, while Jan Masark, the Czech ambassador, cheerily says, “‘Who cares if you rat on us? . . . We have our army.'” Later, in the streets of Prague, she sees this army: “the Sokol striplings, carelessly lively and free-stepping, the girls hardly less broad-shouldered than the boys . . . Trained in groups, in villages and small towns, to the same music, when they came together for the first time in the Stadium they moved as a single body, a vast ballet.” She calls them “confident children” and her companion says, “‘See how gay they are . . . and proud, like dancers. When we train them for the Sokols we take care they are not stiff like Germans. It is a free discipline.'” Knowing what happened afterwards makes this hard to take.

I found Jameson’s personal view of the home front throughout this second war, its runup and its aftermath, enlightening and quite different from official histories. I’m not sure I would have liked Jameson if I had met her—she is very quick to voice her opinions—but I appreciate her lack of self-pity, her generous observations of others, and her flinty Yorkshire individuality.

This week I attended the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference for the first time and was blown away by the insights and camaraderie showered upon me. The book fair alone was rewarding enough: hundreds of literary magazines, presses, MFA programs, and literary organisations filled four large rooms. Finding time to wander the booths was a challenge given the many readings and workshops going on all day and into the evening, not to mention the parties and receptions and conversations in the lobby and hallways.

I enjoyed hearing many of my favorite writers read and talk about their work, such as Joyce Carol Oates, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Junot Diaz (see my blog about his first book here). Joshua Ferris, whose first book I blogged about here, read a new story in its entirety, and Salvador Plascencia, whose amazing People of Paper I blogged about here, gave a hilarious non-reading, in spite of the early hour in which he described being “barely literate”. Other readings I was sorry to miss included Rae Armantrout, Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Strout, Howard Norman, and Stanley Plumley. The WAMFest performance, featuring singer/songwriters and novelists John Wesley Harding (who writes as Wesley Stace) and Josh Ritter surprised and touched me with the intersection of music and prose. Stace’s new novel Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer about a folksong collector in the early 20th century was of particular interest to me given my interest in Cecil Sharp, Mary Neal and Maud Karpeles. Stace said that sometimes a story is just too big for a song, while Ritter described a song as a hallway with many doors, and said that in a novel one can open them and explore what’s inside.

The hardest part was choosing among the many enticing workshops in each timeslot. Some offered practical advice on issues such as copyright, while others explored aspects of the craft of writing such as the lyric essay and metafiction in Latino writing. As I’ve been interested in the influence of place on writing, I benefited from the workshop on the effect of the environment on Appalachian writers. As a poet, I enjoyed hearing poets talk about using the past in their work and the relation of new research on the brain to poetry. However, the workshop that most thrilled and inspired me was the one on Leaping Prose. Bly’s book Leaping Poetry has been a huge influence on me, so I loved hearing Peter Grandbois, Carol Moldaw, Kazim Ali, and Carole Maso translate Bly’s ideas into prose, using their own and others’ stories as examples.

Scattered through the schedule, too, were tributes to writers by those who knew them. I enjoyed the many personal anecdotes related in the celebration of Elizabeth Bishop and Ai, but most moving to me was the tribute to Paul Celan. John Felstiner and Susan Gillespie read letters, recently translated by Gillespie, between Celan and his friend, Ilana Shmueli, written during the last months of his life. Ian Fairley, who has translated several collections of Celan’s poems, used three poems to talk about the complexities of translation, exploring the multiple meanings of a single word and how alternate meanings can shadow the chosen one. Since I’ve been working on translating Italian poems, I listened open-mouthed to Fairley’s soft voice describing etymologies and shades of meaning, what influences a poem and what is left unsaid, how Celan uses poems to give himself a face and how every reader becomes a translator. Gillespie also discussed talked about translation, about needing to bear towards the words and take our bearing from them.

Every writing conference I’ve been to has energised me. Just being around and talking with other writers gives me boost, reminding me that I am a writer, one among many perhaps but nonetheless a writer. From AWP I brought home pages of notes, piles of books, many memories, and a recharged spirit.

What terrific stories! As Josephine Donovan points out in her introduction, Jewett is the bridge between the American “local color” writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rose Terry, and the European realists, such as Flaubert, Tolstoy, Sterne and George Sand. Inspired by Stowe’s novel, The Pearl of Orr’s Island, Jewett sets her own stories in her native Maine, realistically capturing the flavor of life in the rural areas and small towns.

Many of these stories feature characters who are intensely individual, this from a time when towns and farms were more isolated. As Storm Jameson says of her own native Whitby, “Isolation . . . bred, in counterweight to its benefits, a crop of eccentrics, harmless fools, misers, house devils, despots, male and some female . . .” Jewett explores these folks in seemingly simple stories that pack a huge emotional punch. Most of the stories feature women and explore issues of power and powerlessness. “The Flight of Betsey Lane” describes three women in the local poor-house, many of whose residents only come there for the winter months: “far from lamenting the fact that they were town charges, they rather liked the change and excitement of a winter residence on the poor-farm.” The story captures the shifting currents of friendship between the three, their tolerance of each other’s eccentricities, their care for each other, their secrets.

In “Going to Shrewsbury”, the narrator meets up with an elderly countrywoman taking her first-ever train journey. Mrs. Peet has been tricked out of the small farm where she and her now-deceased husband had scraped a living for forty-five years and is on her way to live with a niece who doesn’t seem eager to have her. The mix of emotions—sadness, excitement, loneliness—struck me as genuine, reminding me of elderly parents of a friend who recently moved here, far from their friends and former life, in order to spend their last years near their children. At one point, Mrs. Peet says, ” ‘It may divert me, but it won’t be home. You might as well set out one o’ my old apple-trees on the beach, so ‘t could see the waves come in . . .'”

One area where Jewett excels is capturing the rhythms of speech without the excessive use of dialect that can be so annoying. She characterises her people not just through their speech and actions, but by how others in their small communities react to them and by small details of their clothing, habits, or homes. For example, “The Only Rose” begins “Just where the village abruptly ended, and the green mowing fields began, stood Mrs. Bickford’s house, looking down the road with all its windows, and topped by two prim chimneys that stood up like ears.”

Other stories are more meditative, even lyrical, descriptions of the place. Jewett’s familiarity with native plants and appreciation of nature inform stories like “An Autumn Holiday” and “A Bit of Shore Life”. These are also examples of the “village sketch” format developed by Mary Russell Mitford, where a narrator wanders through her village describing birds and plants and conversing with the unconventional people she meets. Perhaps the most famous story here is “A White Heron” in which a young girl is torn between devotion to the bird and a desire to help the young man who wants to shoot and stuff it to add to his collection.

As it happens, I had never read anything by this well-known author of the late 19th century, not even her most famous book, The Country of the Pointed Firs. I came across her name again last year when I was reading Willa Cather, for Jewett was a mentor for Cather and was much appreciated by the younger writer who named The Country of the Pointed Firs one of the three works of American literature that would be classics, the others being Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the influence of place on writers, even as our places become more homogenized. Jewett’s writing has the grit and get-on-with-it nature of Maine’s rocky, stubborn land. Her work has the stripped-down barrenness of Maine’s long snowbound winter, the darkness of its lonely woods, and the astringent sweetness of its spring. I recommend these stories and will be looking for more of her work.