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| Beth Powning's book of lyrical prose
and colour photographs was published simultaneously by Penguin Books
Canada (Toronto) as Seeds of Another Summer: Finding the Spirit
of Home in Nature, and by Stewart, Tabori & Chang (New
York) as Home: Chronicles of a North
Country Life. "Seeds" is now available in soft cover
and the US edition "HOME" is coming out with Random House
/ Sierra club in a soft cover version soon. All editions can be ordered
through our BOOKSTORE. |
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Praise for Seeds of Another Summer and Home has been enthusiastic: E.L. DOCTOROW: FREEMAN PATTERSON: COURTNEY MILNE: July 1996 Issue of PublishersWeekly Powning combines an extraordinary understanding and sense of place with an affinity for the world of nature. She and her husband, Peter, left their native Connecticut 25 years ago for a farm near the Bay of Fundy, in New Brunswick, Canada. She celebrates their life there in 70 color photos and lyrical prose, chronicling the seasons, marveling at the ephemeral beauty of spring wildfowers and noting the simple pleasures of observation. In winter, Powning longs for a blizzard; without storms, winter creeps by dully. She writes about fields and forests, vegetable gardens and wild fruits, and finds that her life and where she lives are inextricably entwined. This book imparts a feeling of serenity; Annie Dillard fans will enjoy it.
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CHICAGO TRIBUNE review by Chase Collins HOME: Chronicle of a North Country Life Of the many fine books I've read that celebrate nature, this one is a first. There is no agenda here, not a sermon in sight. It is simply Beth Powning's sensuous observation of her natural world - a place with just enough summer to grow food, daunting forests, heavy winters, way up there east of Maine - a farm in New Brunswick. A long way from her childhood Connecticut. "Home: Chronicle of a North Country Life" is the quiet saga of a woman who struggles to acheive that time-consuming, elusive, emotional sense of home in a vast and volatile land. Her search is a universal one, her methods specific to her artistic temperament and location. With beautiful prose and evocative photography, "Home" pours out small wonders, hard-won truths and a desire to connect with nature. It is a study of trees, fields, gardens, wildflowers and boundaries. Without nostalgia, it looks back to childhood, and at the same time incorporates the author's meticulous and flowing observations of her wild and only slightly willing land. Nature is uncooperative; it speaks another language. In spite of all our questions and efforts to communicate, our desire to understand its mysteries, it doesn't answer back. As Annie Dillard once remarked, "silence is nature's one remark." Unlike Dillard facing the silence, Powning doesn't go off on madcap, dazzling tangents after, say, looking into the annihilating eyes of a fox or a coyote. But like Dillard, Powning leans into the frustrating refusal of nature to provide some feedback; she sets to work. She yearns to be included in the majestic sweep of things, wants to be in cahoots with nature's eccentricities, tries to nudge open the door to hidden life. But Powning doesn't intellectualize. Instead, she uses her senses to establish a "transcendent familiarity" with the landscape, transcribing the instant, the moment, and leaving it at that. She reports exactly what she notices without fancy footwork, politics or spirituality. She leaves those things to us, and the reader is grateful. Here is a well-bound volume to be read for its sheer powers of observation. It is restless and curious, a wandering serenity you can hold in your hand. As you turn the pages, the author's photography brings color to her words. You see a broad meadow covered with a mania of red flowers, divided by a yellow creek; a green hillside marked by the damp trail she made through the grass. Her macro lens reveals the side view of a spider's web or the abstract, Edward Weston-like birth of some mysterious vegetable. You see a blizzard from inside and outside the same window. Don't read this book for practical information - read it for the exhilirating mystery of the sprouted seed; don't read it to learn how to construct furniture of bird's-eye maple - read it to watch, hear and feel the titanic felling of the tree itself. And when she takes you out on a hillside in the black of night to watch the aurora borealis, you almost hear an oratorio by Handel and, with the author, experience the difference between rapture and ordinary elation. "Home" is a listing, a rhythmic gathering of detail after detail. It circles aorund nature's blind persistence, listens to the grandeur of the beating of its cold, indifferent heart, takes comfort in its ineffable beauty, and bows its head before the brilliance of its storms. "The wind buffets the house and there's an icy whisper, a handful of tiny diamonds flung against the black window." In summer, the garden reaches perfection in June, when "the soil is rich as chocolate, and light glows in the oakleaf lettuce like sun through a rabbit's ear." Finally, the place becomes known in the deep heart's core, sufficiently known to be called "home." "Now, after all these years, I'm becoming literate in the other language," writes Powning. "My feet know knobby spruce roots. My hands caress soft moss beds. I've smelled leaf mold on autumn mist, tasted sun-hot blueberries. And occasionally, as I touch, taste and listen, the boundary between nature and me bacomes a threshold: I step across. The wild either slips into me, or comes leaping up, like a silver fish, flashing out of my own darkness." Mary Oliver, the nature poet, once asked, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Powning's answer is to meet nature head-on, with her senses wide open, her pen poised and film in her camera. Day after day. In a world increasingly cynical and numb, Powning puts a light in the window for us all, wherever we call home. |
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