Naming the Light
Deen, Rosemary
a shootout when the police stumbled upon the neighborhood where she was being held). Escobar gave himself up and was confined in a specially constructed prison which had many of the characteristics...
...I imagine my small rainworm coming to me on the weather system, perhaps created by the sun in the warm air of the equator, which spins the fastest of any part of the earth, like the rim of a wheel or the outermost whorl of a spindle...
...He would sense the spindle resting on the knees of Necessity...
...192 F...
...Many vapors rising from the sea meet together in one cloud...
...ecause Rosemary Deen is the poetry editor of Corn- nuwal, I should begin by erring that I have never met 11or...
...Year Three is shaped in "a span...
...The police subsequently tracked him down and killed him...
...those drops run together and in many rills of water meet in the same channels...
...Now the renters with the deadly dogs and I have all moved on, but when last I peered into my old neglected yard, the herbs and the perennia is were hanging in there still...
...Library Journal MARTHA MANNING I la rperSan Francisco I Corn:++rurrzura1 2 1 'rlrternber26, JQq: "Cool it, guys--here comes that nut Thoreau again...
...Here is Hall on a subject dear to Deen's heart, "Upon the Rain and Waters": What a sensible interchange there is in nature betwixt union and division...
...The priest took it upon himself to act as media for between Escobar and the government, and made personal contact with the trafficker, who thereupon released the hostages and presented himself to the authorities...
...Suzanne Keen B The Portrait o f a life Colored by Faith NOW IN PAP&MCKI From Martha Manning, author of the powerful Undercurrents, comes this wwickedk funny coming of age story...
...0 Suzanne Keen teaches English literature at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia...
...She tells us in her introduction that Year One is about "the need for green," Year Two about "edges...
...Year Six, you will have noticed, I have skipped over, for in describing it Deen tips her hand: it is "renaissance in some way or other...
...Joseph A. Page, a professor al flit, GcorgeIouWrr Lh:&-ersiri/ dare' Ce+iter, is the ant hor of The Brazilians en rd Pcr6n: A Biography...
...Hall elaborates the metaphorical bur den of his observation: So it either is or should be with spiritual gifts...
...those channels run into the brook, those brooks into the rivers, those rivers into the sea...
...Escobar gave himself up and was confined in a specially constructed prison which had many of the characteristics of a country club and from which he casualiv strolled, an escape made possible by some well-placed bribes...
...Commonweal 2 2 September 26,1997...
...I must say that sentences arranged in such a beautiful pattern, rising here with the metaphor to arrive with a solid thump at the epigrammatic last line, an allu sion to Plato, please this reader in the nearly physical manner of metrical verse...
...But I quoted these lines not for their rhythmic pleasure, but because they il lustrate a habit of mind in which the small object, duly noticed, becomes the vehicle for meditation at least global, and possibly universal, in proportions...
...Lifted up by the incoming cool air from the north or south, he would feel the cool air beneath him lagging behind his equatorial spin, forming the trade winds going with the spin of the earth...
...But Deen is elliptical and (though never obscure) deliberately indirect: She leaves us to figure out on our own the theme of Year Seven, with its med itations on lenses and miniatures such as the terrarium, on ancient sweet pea seeds, on a rainworm and the water logged ground he flees...
...One feels impelled to swap stories of gardens and their denizens: surely Deen would appreciate my obstinate desire to coax a garden out of a desolate New Haven yard, bounded by chain-link fences and flanked by pitbulls, "Samson" and "Sophia" on the left, the more bluntly named "Shotgun" on the right...
...The labels of the contemporary pub lishing world allow that Rosemary Deen's book might be "Nature/Litera ture, " or a garden book, or indeed "Cre ative Nonfiction...
...The deceptively plain, conversational style of these essays makes not only the writing, but the writer herself, seem accessible...
...One receptacle is for all, though a large one, and all make back to their first and main original...
...Garcia Marquez presents a somewhat muted portrait of Escobar,whose larger-than-life qualities would seem to have been perfect grist for the author's literary talents...
...The fortythree short essays that comprise her delightful volume Naming the Light generously open her garden, her circle of friends, her daily life, and the inner world of her meditations to her readers...
...Ne'st's of a Kidnapping displays occasional deft touches, but on the whole it is a minor work by a major talent...
...Yet the cocaine trade continues to flourish, and recent reports of payments made by the drug traffickers to Colombian legislators (and allegedly even to the president) demonstrate the deep roots of lawlessness in the country...
...The rainworm leads to an elegant discussion of water in the landscape: In the natural course of weather, warm and cold, moist and dry do not mix but displace each other in a mutuality of opposition...
...As soon as we em bark with the author in the first essay on a "Water meadow walk to Saint Cross," along Isaak Walton's River Itchen, to a twelfth-century hospital manned by a cagy attendant named Mr...
...One wonders, for example, what flights of fantasy he might have constructed from the following minimalist passage he tossed off in News of a Kidnapping: "Politicians, industrialists, businesspeople, journalists,even ordinary freeloaders, came to the perpetual party...
...Manning's meditation will appeal to thoughtful readers of every persuasion...
...lime I tihould like to...
...Indeed, the part of the narrative that comes closest to the wizardry for which Garcia M6rquez is best known describes Escobar's bizarre surrender, apparently provoked by an appeal from a saintly eighty-two-year-old cleric whose longrunning evening sermonettes ("God's Minute") reached a wide radio audience despite their tendency to lapse into total incomprehensibility...
...14.95...
...Renaissance in a quite specific way, actually, for the whole col lection of essays resembles nothing so much as the seventeenth-century art of prose meditation practiced by divines such as Bishop Joseph Hall...
...where Pablo Escobar kept a zoo with giraffes and hippos brought over from Africa, and where the entrance displayed, as if it were a national monument, the small plane used to export the first shipment of cocaine...
...Reading Deen prompts an imaginary conversation, which is perhaps why her book is so easy to recommend: one wants to widen the circle to make room for more responses...
...M y d ivarication (to divaricate: botanically, to branch at a wide angle) illustrates one of the pleasing results of reading Deen'sessavs, in which the matter-annuals, rocks, sandy soil, old clos THE GARDEN PATH Naming the Light A Week of Years Rosemary Deem UnitYr;ity of fdirzni...
...Cbasins Grace...
...C "Poignant, witty...
...between the equinoxes," Year Four in a curve "down and up...
...that cloud falls down divided into several drops...
...0 God, Thou distillest Thy graces upon us not for our reservation but conveyance...
...Press...
...Heaven, we perceive that Deen has dis tilled out of daily life uncommon con veyances through deep channels...
...In Year Five the essays "are partly about how we try to keep on working with the voices from our lives talking all at once in our heads," a topic that makes me hope that Rosemary Deen will turn next to writing a how-to manual, though the attentive reader will find plenty of instructions (including a wealth of throwaway gardening tips) in Naming the Light...
...Take back, 0 Lord, those few drops Thou hast rained upon my soul and return them into that great ocean of the glory of Thine own bounty, from whence they had their beginning...
...ets, indoor and outdoor tasks, mulch, edges, a terrarium, water-prompts trains of thought which reseed, won't be dislodged, yield trash and treasures, and appear in surprising company, like the willful plants in Deeri s garden...
...Simultaneously moving ant entertaining, Manning's reflections on "growing up Catholic" will inspire all readers to explore their own relationship to faith...
...A difficult book to sum up, and an easy one with which to lose track of time (reading just one more essay before folding the laundry), Deen's collection is in fact rigorously organized into seven sections (the "week") of thematically linked pieces...
...How ineffectual seemed the coral bells and the columbine to improve a plot that yielded a rusted pistol when l first turned the soil...
Vol. 124 • September 1997 • No. 16
