Starred review from September 28, 2009
“I live on land that has not surrendered the last of its wildness,” Shetterly (The New Year's Owl: Encounters with Animals, People and the Land They Share
) writes of her home in rural Maine. “It keeps secrets, and those secrets prompt us to pay attention, to look for more.” In her first essay collection in more than 20 years, she beautifully renders some of what she's learned in the decades since she and her then husband moved into an unfinished cabin—“idealistic, dangerously unprepared, and, frankly, arrogant, she can see now.” Most of these essays, however, focus on life after she's settled in, when she's learned to listen for the sounds of the coming spring through her open bedroom window or impulsively stands down a bobcat that's chased a baby rabbit into the middle of the road. Shetterly's eye for poetic detail is exquisite, especially in longer essays such as the story of how she nursed an injured raven back to health, after which it set up home on her roof and became best friends with her terrier. But she writes about her neighbors (even those she admits she never really knew) with equal grace and empathy. Let's hope it's not another quarter-century before her next collection arrives.
November 15, 2009
An intimate guided tour of the woods and waterways of rural Maine.
After a brief early childhood in Manhattan, naturalist and children's-book author Shetterly (Shelterwood, 1999, etc.) and family moved to a large colonial house in Connecticut surrounded by natural beauty. In these open environs, the budding naturalist explored the wilderness and learned something of the isolating yet communal human experience available in wild spaces. In 1971, the author moved with her husband to a small cabin on a 60-acre lot in southeast Maine and started a family. The marriage didn't last, but what endured was Shetterly's passion for this rural area and its inhabitants: moose, hares, hummingbirds, snapping turtles, bobcats, turkeys, deer, loons, seals, cormorants, coyotes and a smattering of rugged humans. The author marks seasons by ice's halting progress across a wide lake or a flock of geese buzzing her open window on their way north on a cold April night. The aching tension between humankind's brief, greedy chronology and nature's timeless immediacy underlies much of Shetterly's experiences. She lives deeply in her rough, adopted home, digging into local history and lore, ultimately recognizing the best of her years as a bucolic lull between the area's agrarian past and its future as a population center. She notes the interplay of humanity and wilderness through fishing, forestry, conservation, preservation, hunting, trapping, development and wildlife rehabilitation, but also in quiet, personal appreciation. Shetterly is a less verbose Thoreau, allowing nature's wisdom to seep through her simple yet thorough observations.
A soft wind stirring the leaves on trees marked for removal.
(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
December 1, 2009
Indelible images abound in Shetterlys stellar collection of distinctive and revelatory essays about her life spent in and along Maines rugged woods and coasts. A wounded garter snake is delicately placed in her coat pocket and nursed back to health in a soup pot. A blinded raven cavorts with her pet dog in a primal dance that prepares it for its return to the wild. While ice creeps and mud seeps, Shetterly waits and watches with the patience and passion of a natural-born naturalist. Nor is her precisely trained eye focused only on the life that teems in the skies and seas around her. People, too, are cause for consideration: the fisherman who encounters whales and swordfish; the garbage collector who repairs what others reject. Shetterlys penetrating observations resonate with an undeniable sense of what matters most in life: the preservation of self, the protection of wilderness, and appreciation for the passage of time in a world where speed, haste, and destruction trump leisure, care, and restoration.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)