Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains [Paperback]

Merrill Gilfillan (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Lakota word for bluebird, writes High Plains poet Gilfillan, is a verb meaning something like "to pass by all in blue." Gilfillan turns the endless hazy vistas of Wyoming, Colorado, and the Dakotas into verbs all their own, populating them with crows, magpies, meadowlarks, passing clouds--and always with stories derived from history and from his own travels. He is especially drawn to buttes, river bottoms, and sandy ridges, the difficult landscapes that "house and shelter the talisman and nurturing myth, the taproot metaphysics of any geography." Visiting places like Turtle Mountain, Devil's Lake, and Heart River, Gilfillan offers fine tribute to a little-heralded corner of the world. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author

Merrill Gilfillan is the author of "Magie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains" which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for non fiction, "Sworn Before Cranes," a collection of short stories that won the Ohio Book Award and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and, most recently, "Burnt House to Paw Paw: Applachian Notes," along with some half-dozen books of poetry. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Johnson Books; First Edition edition (October 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555662277
• ISBN-13: 978-1555662271
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,542,935 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rich, return-to prose, November 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains (Paperback)

Believe Jim Harrison's endorsement: this is outstanding prose. It is probably the best I, too, have yet read, and I plan to read it again. In an age of so many one-read books, I find this a comfort.

I bought CHOKECHERRY PLACES specifically to read on a recent train trip around the country; I pulled it out only when we were crossing those bowed sky-span spaces of the plains, and relished the reading. I could gaze out the window to the North Dakota buttes that on one of Gilfillan's visits "were taking on that homesick evening-sun look, and I was thinking, I suppose, of erosion and atrophy and wash-away and large, charged events vanishing."

This book reminded me of the potential that lies within words; it is elegantly crafted writing that rests in the mind like a heartfully prepared, home-cooked meal rests in the belly. Gilfillan writes with such detail and grace you'd think that nature itself, his subject, was italicized.

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Spirit of place gone missing....., January 8, 2001

By 

Dianne Foster "Di" (USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains (Paperback)

CHOKECHERRY PLACES by Merrill Gilfillan did not sweep me away as as one critic on the backcover suggested it might. Nor did I find Gilfillan particularly poetic. I found the book mildly interesting in places, and the sort of thing one might throw into a back pack when traveling the high plains area north-east-west of Denver--which I have done. In fact, I read it slowly, one essay per night, thinking it might bring back some of the wonderous feeling I experienced in this lonesome land.

Gilfillan's narrative is one step up from a travelog, the reader is conscious of a narrator, but he is no Charles Kuralt nor Paul Theroux. Some essays are better than others, but something is missing from all of them. I did not obtain a sense of Gilfillan's spirtual or moral bearing, though I think he might have one.

My own experience in these wild and natural places has been the great sense of awe the Transcendentalists described. I will never forget the first time I saw the buttes, those wonderous islands leftover from the withdrawal of a prehistoric sea. I don't recall Gilfillan contemplating their ontological connections, though he does note their beauty in the late afternoon sun. His writing comes close to expressing appreciation of the scenes he surveys, but he never quite suceeds with words the way Georgia O'Keefe succeeded with paint.

I found some of his stories disturbing. Gilfillan apparently has no qualms about helping a man search for yellow feathers needed to round out a fan. And, no, the old man doesn't collect the feathers from the ground under trees where birds perched and preened themselves as Ben Nighthorse Campbell once suggested when describing how modern Indians make Eagle feather headdresses. The old man kills the little Finches with Gilfillan's help. The killing of these little birds doesn't register a blip on Gilfillan's ethics meter. When I read this essay, I was reminded of the many extinct birds that once lived in Hawaii. You can see their pretty little feathers in the dusty capes and helmets stored in musuem exhibit cases.

Nor does the digging of wild turnips seem a problem. Okay, if Gilfillan was the only person who ever dug them up what would it matter? But he isn't, and by advertising their existance, and the fact he felt no qualms about digging them up, he helps contribute to their extinction. It doesn't even occur to him that one reason the plants have evolved a mechanism for losing their above ground vegetation during the warmer months is for survival.

Gilfillan is not a Naturalist. He is the worst sort of exploiter who roams the high plains and follows a way of life which allows him to indulge his needs and wants and through his writing to encourage others to follow. This is no Pilgrim at Tinker Creek warning us of the extinction of the Monarch Butterfly.