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The Hatbox Letters by Beth Powning
Knopf Canada 2004, now available in paperback by Vintage Canada
In the US - St. Martin's Press 2005, now available in paperback by St. Martin's Press
The Globe and Mail, August 21, 2004 - "...a deeply beautiful book... a stunning debut."
"Powning brilliantly illuminates grief in all its shape-shifting pain, and in so doing, expands her characters’ lives, and ours." Click here to read the full review
The National Post, August 21, 2004 - "Powning writes about grief with uncanny precision; she gets all its ambushes and piercing aches exactly right. Rich, atmospheric, textured and swift.
Maclean’s, September 6, 2004 - "Powning’s central artistic concern...(is to) locate herself -- and her characters -- along the great chain of being...a remarkable portrait."
The Chronicle Herald, Halifax, Sept 5, 2004 - "..an ode to joy and a lamentation. Powning’s exquisite novel sings...As brilliant as the light toward which it reaches."
N.B. Reader - "A novel of stunning beauty...The Hatbox Letters is a moving elegy to things lost and found."
Edmonton Journal - "Powning has an unerring sense of pacing and balance...She can wrest mesmerizing passages from scenes other writers might gloss over."
The Toronto Sun - "Filled with beautiful descriptions of the natural world, the seasons and the journey towards acceptance and a certain peace of mind, Powning's book is a fascinating trip through generations of a family."
The Toronto Star - "Powning writes with the sensibility of a photographer...trying to capture the essence of the moment, the object, of life."
Quill and Quire - "The writing is highly sensual, painterly even, vividly portraying the natural world and its changing seasons...The depth of detail feels appropriate, mirroring the deliberate pace of Kate's recovery and regeneration. Powning's subject here is no less the the relationship of life and death, and she engages it with rigour and grace."
The Gazette, Montreal - "A superior writer, with startling powers of description...Powning's descriptions of gardens and birds rival any Audobon painting. The Hatbox Letters is not only an absorbing literary experience, but an exquisite visual experience, as well."
The London Free Press - "One of the most appealing novels to be published in Canada in the last decade...Beautifully written and emotionally wise, this is a debut novel with a difference. Its melding of past and present in the life of its protaganist is so well woven it will prove a boon to readers with a taste for fiction and non-fiction alike....rich, elegiac and full of resonance,( Powning's) novel is more than impressive.It is a winner."
The Vancouver Sun - "Blessed with a fabulous eye for detail...(Powning) makes Kate's garden a visual treat...the imagery is evocative and clear, and the feelings of love and loss are transmitted effectively and elegantly. The Hatbox Letters conveys a sense of wonder and wisdom."
American Reviews
Kirkus Reviews - "Powning has a delicate and lyrical touch..."
Out Word Bound - "A fresh, intriguing story..."
Publisher's Weekly - "...excellent..."
Romantic Times, (four stars) - "...lyrical...poignant.."
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By M.J. ANDERSON
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
The Hatbox Letters
Grief is a barren landscape; it mirrors the death it mourns. Kate Harding, protagonist of Beth Powning's sumptuous first novel, The Hatbox Letters, is a young widow entering her second year of grief following the sudden, early death of her husband Tom. In their riverbank farmhouse in rural New Brunswick, "she is inhabiting, with pain, a vacancy."
Kate is adrift, alone; her daughter lives in Halifax and her son is away in Ireland. Though she has friends and family who allow her "to mourn the past," there is "a grief she can't reveal." The loss of the future that belonged to Tom and Kate is "like a new death, the death of someone no one else knows." The isolating irony ofgrief, though it is a universal experience, is ultimately singular, unspeakable. Many of the characters in the novel struggle to give voice or shape to their loss; most are inarticulate in their sorrow. Powning brilliantly illuminates grief in all its shape-shifting pain, and in so doing, expands her characters' lives, and ours.The novel begins with Kate literally standing on a threshold. She looks into her living room at nine antique hatboxes, recently arrived from the attic of her grandparent's house in Connecticut. Along with the musty smell and the fond memories, these hatboxes also bring grief. Kate is upset that she has accepted responsibility for the diaries and letters of generations of her father's family.
While delineating the sere interior landscape of mourning, Powning has crafted a deeply beautiful book, one planted in the natural world, abundant in imagery that firmly roots Kate and the reader in the fecund cycle of life. A novel about death that makes you joyously glad that you are alive, The Hatbox Letters is both elegy and song of joy.
Kate wonders, "Where do they go, the recently dead?" Though she cannot answer, she is aware that "rooms seem smaller, their space filled, an excessive weight to every object ..... as if thematerial world is intensively alive." The natural world is "intensively alive" on every page. A reader might almost imagine the paper reverting to a growing, living thing, sprouting leaves in her hands.The story encompasses four full seasons, and so offers a year within which the imagery is shaped to the world. The novel quivers with light: "The garden is shining. Every leaf holds a spear or prism or cup of light." And it echoes with the sounds of rain, crickets and wind. Powning is a photographer (as well as author of several non-fiction titles, including The Seeds of Another Summer and Shadow Child), and clearly she has translated her visual art into prose. It is an extraordinary achievement.
The papers Kate reluctantly begins to archive "go back as far as 1797, when her great-great-great-grandmother" came to live in the house known as Shepton. It is the house where Kate spent summers with her grandparents. The letters open an "unspecific longing" within Kate, a longing reminiscent of adolescence, "when nothing seems to have been lost, and yet one is filled with grief." The past and present resonate in her life; layers of grief overlap.
Throughout the novel, Powning crafts natural images that subtly echo the novel's plot. As Kate reads the past into the present, entwines her childhood with her widowhood, she "listens to crickets, thinks how they make two sounds at once, a long shrilling tinnitus from which breaks separate voices that rise and fall in a pulse both irregular and rhythmic.
As in Proust, Kate is thrown from present to past by sensory experience. The "autumn light that sleeks from red apples" recalls the apple orchards (and the apple pies) of her grandparents' home. In what she sees as perhaps a "new stage of grief," she is "compelled [to] shoulder aside the present moment in favour of images that return her to times when she felt like a firefly at dusk, a minnow in the shadows. ..... Small, safe, included." The diaries and her memories of Shepton initially provide this escape. Ultimately, it is the past that will lead Kate to her future.Kate is drawn into her grandfather's young life, when he is still a bachelor living with his parents, and she feels a "peculiar excitement' upon reading his daily entries. She is so immersed in the rhythm of Grandpa Giles's life, it is with a sudden jolt that she raises her head from pages of Connecticut summer outings in 1913 to realize it is the frozen beginning of another winter in New Brunswick.
During a solitary day trip to St. Mary's, an ocean shore site famous for its migratory sandpipers, Kate sees a familiar-looking man. But memories of Tom overwhelm her and, as much to escape the memories as to avoid human contact, she moves on. But this man will meet with her yet, and bring even more of her past and her pain to the surface. Gregory Stiller and his wife were very close friends with Tom and Kate, when both young couples were raising their children. Camping trips and frequent outings knotted the families together. But the Stillers moved away as the children approached their teens, and the friendship ended. Now Gregory has walked onto the beach at St. Mary's and into Kate's grief. But he is weighted with his own tragedy, and his anger and self-absorption are distorted echoes of Kate's mourning.Kate experiences time as an oxbow in a river. The semi-circular winding loop of an oxbow bends a river back on itself and, if you are moving on the river, creates the impression that you are travelling backward while actually continuing forward. What an apt image for this fluid novel. Time folds, memories lap over one another, and Kate exists in three stages of her life simultaneously: her present, her past with Tom and her childhood at Shepton. She travels even further into the past to inhabit the lives of her grandparents.
Powning has created a vivacity in the scenes chronicling Grandpa Giles's courtship, marriage and family life, which contrasts sharply with Kate's quiescent present. She is treading water in this river of grief and memories. Both Grandpa Giles's life and the natural world outside Kate's farmhouse are bursting with life force. Powning parallels Kate's journey in the subplot involving Gregory Stiller. There are choices to be made, and they must be made within the context of a world that moves ahead with or without us.
If there is anything critical to be said of this stunning debut, it is that Powning's imagery can (infrequently) tip from astounding to florid. When imagery is this picture perfect, the odd clunker stands out. "Roofs the size of playing cards" and "reeds which flash like a sword-brandishing army" are rare missteps. But more likely, readers will be too intoxicated to notice.
M..J. Anderson is the owner of Frog Hollow Books in Halifax
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The Hatbox Letters 
