From Publishers Weekly
In these jewel-like essays, Underhill invites readers to practice the difficult art of stillness. Quiet, small, transcendent moments of illumination that restore us to ourselves and to a sense of connection with all things can occur, she insists, while watching the rain, or sweeping the porch, or sitting and looking at the backyard. To commune with nature, she reassures readers, it's not necessary to emulate Thoreau, to leave home and go live in the woods. Underhill, who lives in western New York's rural Allegheny County (where she teaches at Alfred University), finds creative solitude in her yard and in a nearby private sanctuary, her family's farm, with its cabin by a pond. Of course, such idyllic settings aren't available to many, yet her keenly observant reflections?on wind, trees, birds, water, on nature's symphony of colors, on the spiritual rewards of gardens and gardening?overflow with evidence that nature watching has greatly enriched her life, and beckon us to do likewise. Underhill also follows engaging, serendipitous tangents, describing a ride on a hot-air balloon with a veteran pilot or exploring the roots of Christmas traditions in pagan Saturnalia. While her book opens by briefly describing a successful grassroots campaign to prevent former New York governor Mario Cuomo from placing a nuclear waste dump in Allegany County, and while Underhill bemoans the loss of wilderness that has drastically reduced the number of migrating songbirds in her area, this is not an environmentalist activist's screed. It's more a series of elegant meditations in the tradition of Wendell Berry, sprinkled with references to poetry, myth, science, Taoism, ecology and ancient customs.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A dozen uneven essays that hover between mild epiphany and quiet appreciation of the natural world, from Underhill (Writing/Alfred Univ.). Upon moving to a remote county in New York State in 1991, and watching as her neighbors fought the siting of a low-level nuclear-waste dump on their patch, Underhill decided to tap into the cosmic hum of the place. She wanted to see what was so special as to move the county's residents to protect it so fervently, to experience those all-too-brief moments of clarity in the outdoorssacred and humbling and inspiringthat visit the attentive like flashes of haiku illumination. Most of the encounters chronicled here are sincere if glancing, which is not so odd considering the inscrutability of Underhill's subjects (color, time), but they are also not infrequently sappy and banal, which is odd, because she is plainly intelligent and well read. Underhill is at her best when discovering the ancientness of her fixations: how the Celts were just as enthralled by bogs as she is and nastily sacrificed one of their number to appease the bog god; the human urge to divide the day into segments, be they canonical hours or Saxon tides or shadow markers. And she is also good when simply in awe, as when ice turns a landscape opalescent and pulls the strange trick of amplifying sounds in the upper register, filling the air with vague, ethereal calls. Then she will trot out something so utterly trite it makes the teeth ache: she describes clouds as ``like ships in full sail driven by an ocean breeze,'' chapter-opening epigrams are so timeworn they seem tongue-in-chee. Fortunately, each of these pieces can be sampled on its own, winnowing the graceful, enthusiastic Underhill from her inexplicably stumblebum flip side. --
Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
