Seeds of Another Summer by Beth Powning

Home: Chronicles of a North Country Life by Beth Powning

REVIEWS

E.L. DOCTOROW (jacket blurb) - "Beth Powning's beautiful celebration of natural life is meet and proper for these unnatural times. I think it will be read for years to come."

FREEMAN PATTERSON (jacket blurb) - "Quite simply, this book is the most evocative marriage of words and photographs I have ever been privileged to experience. From her acute and powerful observation of her physical surroundings, Beth Powning creates images that resonate in the soul."

Freeman Patterson, Telegraph-Journal - "A true marriage of words and photographs...Beth's sense of home is not of a static dwelling, but of a place of seasons, cycles, and lifespans, or experiences and memories...This is a book for your soul."

Martin Levin, The Globe and Mail - "Powning takes her camera, her pen, and most important, her spirit into the landscape....The delicate, often beautiful photographs combine with a quietly spirited naturalistic prose in an Annie Dillard - Henry David Thoreau mode to produce a work evocative in both sensual and domestic ways."

Vancouver Sun - "Powning supplements her lyrical photos of the details of nature's beauties with equally lyrical passages about the spiritual succor she finds on the boundaries between the natural and the human."

The Guardian, Charlottetown - "One of the most beautiful books imaginable."

The Windsor Star - "Powning's eye is keen and curious. Nothing escapes her...A powerful statement that makes us sit up and wonder what we've been missing."

The Burlington Spectator -"[Powning's] strong poetic writing weaves images and insight into a tapestry of bewitching presence...Economy of phrase and deliberate understatement etch details in the reader's mind in a way that no overblown passages ever could achieve."

Courtney Milne, author of Sacred Places in North America - "Beth Powning's sensuous photographs and pure, powerful prose lure us into their embrace, laying bare our desire for a union with the natural world. This is the work of a gifted artist."

Edmonton Journal - "Beautifully detailed...substantial...can turn the heads of hard-core urbanites..."

U.S. REVIEWS

July 1996 Issue of Publishers Weekly

Starred review
The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling - "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. "

USA Today - "Powerful, beautiful images. Powning...stays pure to her vision of nature."

Orion - "Powning's Home is one of the most beautifully executed books to come our way in a long time...rings with joy..."

Chicago Tribune - "A wandering serenity you can hold in your hand...with beautiful prose and evocative photography, [this book] pours out small wonders, hard-won truths and a desire to connect with nature...In a world increasingly cynical and numb, Powning puts a light in the window for us all, wherever we call home." click here for full review

Bloomsbury Review - "An eloquent celebration of the rural lifestyle and a joy to experience; the author proves herself as fully adept with photography as she is with writing."

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review - "Powning's choice of language and the rhythm of her prose wondrously evoke the idea of living within a natural setting so violently wild and indifferent to human intention."

Buffalo News - "An elegant account of the author's move to a New Brunswick farm..Each paragraph is a gem."

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CHICAGO TRIBUNE
September 15, 1996

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.