Maine Books

Another wonderful edition of Granta literary magazine. This issue deals with a world gone ecologically mad, thanks to the work of men/women. Ocean currents and plankton animals disappearing, islands being swamped, weather gone mad... All a result of Global Warming. President Bush's suggestion? Global warming is too harsh, just call it climate change. What a guy..... what a president!

Something has been going on at Granta in the last three editions. I have every edition printed but in the last three this self-proclaimed organ of "new writing" is as good, maybe better, than it has ever been. The last four editions, including this one and Hidden Histories (No 85) have been exemplary, rivetting and brilliant. All deserve to be read from cover to cover which I cannot recall ever having done with any other edition of Granta . In THIS OVERHEATING WORLD, from the piece by Bill McKibben to that by Huha al-Radi called 28 Days in Baghdad, you will be enthralled. GRANTA is on a hot streak at the moment. It does not get better than this.

The Granta collections are always a treasure chest. With enough variety to suit nearly every taste, some are clearly more desirable due to focus. In this issue, "This Overheating World" is a topic needing further coverage and attention. Of the fourteen items assembled, half are devoted to climate change, its impact and our response to it. All are well written and worthy of close attention. The other essays are more varied, but nearly as important. Although there are some contentious issues under scrutiny here, the topics are, for some, an introduction needing further notice.

Bill McKibben opens this issue with an analysis of why Americans seem bent on ignoring the climate change going on around us. He recapitulates the research that has gone into revealing the evidence of climate change, such as ice, tree and sediment cores. He thinks enough data has been accumulated and presented to the public to cause some shift in thinking and behaviour. Little, if any, of that has been achieved. He calls for an "Orwell" or a "Thoreau" to produce a book or film that will awaken the public to the hazard. His admission that his own book failed in this regard makes sad reading.

Following essays by Maarten t' Hart, Philip Marsden, Matthew Hart and Mark Lynas recount local manifestations of the climate change phenomena. Mighty dust storms, loss of water supplies and reduced rainfall are having significant impact on the lives of many people. How those people will react and whether the rest of the world will be dealing with their fate remain questions still unasked. Solutions aren't even being debated at this point.

"This Overheating World" is occurring in the political world, as well. Three essays on the American crusade in Iraq and its results conclude the book. In a poignant account, Huha al-Radi describes her return to Baghdad to assist her family in recovery from the invasion. Spending less than a month with her mother and their orchards. In a daily diary, she records how nature and the invaders have acted to spoil her crop and her family's livelihood. As a human account of the misery still being inflicted on Iraq, it makes disturbing reading. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

The book was not as beautiful as the experience. The first time I went I left a feather and stones and couldn't bear to leave, subsequent visits were as powerful but in the way a life is crafted, one builing upon another. Bill is superlative. The book is good but needs to be taken in small portions, savored,it added to my experience. Building a yurt should be done by any awake human. Bill's the only authentic one I know of-the rest, shallow imitations, posers, pretenders, charlatans and just plain not it. Even though I'm sure they are earnest folks.

I didn't go looking for this book. It simply fell into place. Literally. While I was browsing in the satellite branch of my local public library for books about business this volume fell on my head. It had been left precariously on top of the shelf.
Aesthetics appeal to me, to the cover was intriguing. I skipped the book about where mobile and wireless technology is taking society and immediately checked out A Handmade Life.
It is a beautifully presented book. The photographs of an idyllic life in Maine are appealingly presented. The text proposes a way of life that, even here on the paradisical edge of the Pacific Ocean, on the edge of the world, even, it is hard not to yearn for. And maybe that is true value of the book. It awakened a hankering in me for a more naieve way. Strangely it also help me make a number of business choices I had been faced with. Appropriate considering there is a side-bar in the book:

"Borrow from cultures old and new
And with our imaginations

Blend those borrowings
To Create new ways to live
That are simpler, gentler
More generous and beautiful."

Is that my cell-phone ringing?

It's funny how even a quick browsing of this book tells you it has integrity. It's some combination of the artful layout, the paper quality, and of course the author's inspiration living-the-talk life. A Handmade Life evokes a simple but deep way to live. I should confess, however, that I haven't read the whole book, but I love it anyway and keep it on my desk by computer, sipping it now and again like a wine brewed for inspiration. It's a reminder to slow down, focus more on craft than result and quality more than quantity.

Another one in this genre is The Hand-Sculpted House.

Sensual and exotic. These poems are crafted with precision yet are delicate as cherry blossoms.

This elegantly bound book contains a treasure of words that seduce and enchant the reader. I highly recommend it. I am anxiously awaiting the next book.

Leah Maines traces with delicate poetic brush strokes moments of love and tenderness, images of nature, feelings of joy, sometimes of sadness and slight unease--

like the hungry bird, I, too,
am searching for sustenance and
find it in a ray
of sun that fools the clouds and
for a moment I forget home...
("During the Rainy Season")

Like a Zen painting which always leaves an empty space, so her poems draw us into her world between East and West but create at the same time an opening which allows us to find something of our own in these pages.

"Looking to the East with Western Eyes" is the expression of a fine and enchanting sensibility. Beautiful work!

Christa Polkinhorn-Umiker, Poet and Translator, Santa Monica, California.

Ms. Chetkowski has created a wonderful and whimsical sequal to her first book, "Maybel Takes a Ferry," which was equally enchanting for readers of all ages. This beautifully crafted second work, together with the return of the warm and personal artistic contributions of Ms. Dawn Peterson, invites one and all to join the Chetkowski family and take part in the lovable escapades of Maybel, the engaging and independent rascal star of story. I, for one feel as if I am already know and am part of the Chetkowski family. Perhaps during one of my sojourns along the beautiful Maine coast, I will actually run across Maybel and her human charges. Until then, I will anxiously wait for the third installment to come out. Hopefully, before another tourist season invades our coast!

In Mabel Takes A Sail, a friendly, energetic dog named Mabel embarks on a grand adventure when she and her family set off on a sailing trip around the island of Islesboro, Maine. Landlubber Maxine (the family's new dog) comes along for the ride and Mabel finds that she has her paws full as she tries to teach Maxine a thing or two about sailing and boating safety. Recommended for young readers, especially those who own pets and have access to sail boats, Emily Chetkowski's clever and entertaining story is aptly illustrated by the drawings of Dawn Peterson.

What a terrific book! I have owned and bred Tibetan Terriers for over 20 years and Emily has a real grip on the adventurous nature of this breed. Tibetan Terriers love their families and Emily has shown us how the family bond and the inquisitiveness which is inherent in the breed go together. As a social worker,I have used the previous Mabel Takes The Ferry book and have already planned how to incorporate the newest Mabel Story into my work with children. Thanks Emily!

Our entire family enjoyed this book after a family vacation in Maine. It's a darling story, well written. We've read it over and over again! Emily Chetkowski sure seems to be a talented writer of children's books.

We love Mabel! This is our first book of the series and we can't wait to read the other books. A wonderful adventure that has become my 4 year old's favorite story. We read it every night before bed!:o)

I've been to the exact place in Maine that Mabel took her stroll and I was able to picture this book very clearly in my mind. This is a wondeful book, especially for those of us who love their dogs like they are one of the family.

The mountains, forests, seashore, wildlife, and people of Maine have been inspiring writers since the 1600's. 1989's "Maine Speaks" is a fascinating anthology of literature about the State of Maine and its unique population. A few of the contributing authors, so to speak, are Samuel De Champlain, a 17th century French explorer, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who grew up in Maine, and Stephen King, a life-long Maine resident and master writer of horror. The content covers a huge spectrum, from poetry and song to short stories to historical narrative and essay.

This collection is highly recommended to those who think they know Maine and want to know it better.

Maine Speaks is a truly wonderful collection of classic and contemporary fiction, nonfiction and poetry by Maine writers. It is the best book I have read on my favorite of all states.

What an intriguing selection of Maine writing! Here's one of my oldest friends, Edna St. Vincent Millay's Renascence. I was born in the shadow of Mt. Battie, where a 19-year-old poet wrote the stanzas that my dad and I could - between us - recite our way through. Here's some deliciously eerie speculative fiction by Stephen King (The Reach), and another such piece by Philip Booth (The Day the Tide). Here's Ruth Moore's work excerpted, and that of E.B. White and Elizabeth Coatsworth.

The real treasure for me, though, is the work by Maine writers I hadn't encountered before despite a lifetime of reading. The variety and quality of the Maine Literature Project's selections make this anthology both a fine introduction to my native state and its people, and a treat for those of us who've been here always.

Reviewed by Nina M. Osier, author of 2005 EPPIE winner REGS

I had been wanting to lay my hands on this book for years, since it was out of print I never got it. Now, by chance (thanks to Amazon), I found out that Robert Jones had a new edition published at Heimburger House. Finding out and ordering was just one single step. Here I am now: it is a beautiful book, this new edition being even better thanks to today's publishing possibilities. There is a wealth in illustrations, and nearly all the information you might want. There is a lot to learn about them 'Lilliputs', as Linwood Moody called them. I would have liked to find a few additional pages about the whats and whereabouts of today's 24 inchers. Where are the museums, where can I go to see the last remainders ?

I had been wanting to lay my hands on this book for years, since it was out of print I never got it. Now, by chance (thanks to Amazon), I found out that Robert Jones had a new edition published at Heimburger House. Finding out and ordering was just one single step. Here I am now: it is a beautiful book, this new edition being even better thanks to today's publishing possibilities. There is a wealth in illustrations, and nearly all the information you might want. There is a lot to learn about them 'Lilliputs', as Linwood Moody called them. I would have liked to find a few additional pages about the whats and whereabouts of today's 24 inchers. Where are the museums, where can I go to see the last remainders ?

Robert C. Jones has done a great service to fans of Maine's narrow guage railroads by republishing Linwood Moody's classic book on the Pine Tree State's 2-foot guage railroads. No one wrote with the passion for these narrow guage trains than Moody, whose book was originally published in 1958. For devotees of these trains, "The Maine Two-Footers" has been the bible, if you can find a copy. Jones has written extensivly on railroads in Vermont and Maine. His "Two Feet to..." series of books are packed with pictures and information. This new edition of "The Maine Two-Footers" has added photographs and is in a larger format than the original.

This book chronicles the adventures of Thoreau as he encounters wilderness in the guise of backwoods Maine. The book covers 3 separate expeditions that Thoreau made in 1846, 1853 and 1857. On each trip, Thoreau was accompanied by one or more companions, as well as an Indian guide.

Of all of Thoreau's books, this one sticks most closely to nature and travel writing, with little explicit philosophizing. Although Thoreau was accustomed to taking long walks off the beaten track in Massachusetts, it was in Maine where he first encountered genuine wilderness. He found the wild surroundings quite inspiring, and far from being overwhelmed by them, he seemed to want even more. In this book, he presents detailed accounts of the flora and fauna that observed on his Maine journeys. In addition to his observations of the natural world, Thoreau also describes many of the people and tiny communities that he found on his trips through Maine. While he follows his custom of never naming his traveling companions or providing personal information about them, he seems to feel no similar compunction about the privacy of his Indian guides, and describes them and their behavior in detail as if they were suitable subjects of his travel studies rather than co-travelers. One aspect that makes this book timeless is the fact that so much of the natural world that Thoreau describes has remained unchanged in the 150 years since his journeys.

Most people are familiar with Thoreau through his Walden. Few know perhaps that he didn't stay put in Concord but journeyed to the Maine Woods and elsewhere, and that these travels were formative of his philosophy and ideas. Thoreau believed the Maine wilderness north of Bangor was every bit as wild as the west and other far flung corners of the continent in the 1850s, and here he shows us an incredible panorama of beauty and wonder. You will gain insight into how Native Americans hunted Moose in the mid-19th Century and why Thoreau, a vegetarian, disdained the killing of animals for meat. One of the most sriking passages is his description of the sound of a huge tree falling in the forest in the distance at night.

In Ktaadn, Thoreau defines the essence of wilderness:

"Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor wast-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth as it was made forever and ever."

You do not need to read The Maine Woods on a wooded island in Maine (as I did) to be captivated and transported by it to a higher and greater sense of wilderness than you may ever have imagined.

In 1848, 1853,and 1857, Henry David Thoreau travelled to the wilderness -- forests, lakes, rivers, and mountains in the northwest part of Maine. He wrote three lengthy essays describing each of his journeys, and they were gathered together, as Thoreau had wished, and published after his death, together with an appendix, as "The Maine Woods." It is a moving book, a classic work of American literature, and the founder of a genre of descriptive travel writing.

Readers coming to "The Maine Woods" after "Walden" or "A Walk on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" may be in for a surprise. These earlier books do include extensive descriptions of nature and of plants and animals, but their focus is much more internalized and philosophical. Both books are full of discussions of themes that have little direct connection with nature. They show Thoreau as a Transcendentalist, an American philosopher akin to Emerson and others.

"The Maine Woods", in contrast, shows Thoreau as much more of a naturalist interested in describing the wilderness in great detail for its own sake. I think the book articulates a philosophical temperament akin to Thoreau's earlier books, but it is for the most part implicit rather than stated at length.

The three essays describe Thoreau's journeys at widely separated times to Mount Ktaadn, the Chesuncook River, and the Allegash and East Branch Rivers, journeys that overlapped to some degree. Thoreau travelled with a companion and with Indian guides. He gives the reader pictures of what was still largely a pristine wilderness even though it was, at that early time, already being subject to logging, the growth of towns, and despoilation. We see Thoreau and his companions travelling in canoes or batteaus on the interconnected rivers and lakes of northwest Maine, carrying and portaging their vessels around falls, camping in the woods, observing the vegetation and animals, getting lost, finding shelter from the rain, visiting lumber camps and the hardy residents of the woods, gathering berries, hunting, and much else. The narrative is filled with detail of Thoreau's experiences and thoughts.

I found the most moving part of the book was Thoreau's description of his climb up Mount Ktaadn in the first essay. We see this journey in detail, described with ancient Greek and American Indian symbolism. It concludes with a long peroration of the value of wilderness -- of land not controlled or under the disposition of people. Thoreau observes that "the country is virtually unmapped and unexplored, and there still waves the virgin forest of the New World." The "Chesuncook" essay includes a vivid description of the stalking and killing of a moose and Thoreau's resultant sense of discomfort. It closes with a call for the creation of national preserves for wilderness. The final essay describes a broad spectrum of adventures and places on a day-to-day basis. There are many passages that describe Thoreau's Indian guide, Joe Polis. Although Thoreau was deeply fascinated with the Indian heritage of Maine, some of his treatment of Polis will sound stereotyped to modern readers.

Thoreau's book was the first in a long line of American works devoted to nature. But I was reminded most of the Beat writers in some of their moments, of Jack Kerouac, (a native of Lowell, Massachusetts) in "The Dharma Bums" describing rucksacking and the climbing of a mountain and of the poetry of Gary Snyder.

This book is about the need to leave the beaten path and follow one's star. There are some fine websites in which the interested reader can get more information about the places Thoreau visited. [...]

Robin Friedman

Reading this, I had the sensation I was reading excellent, adroit, wry, thing-oriented, deep, and best of all, humorous poetry, yet dragging the book around like a secret stash of pistachio cookies. The hilarious --yet, how does he do it?, melancholy--sestina ostensibly a cowboy's journal, with three or four end words all being BEEF (plural beeves) had me skipping down the halls at work. Other poems such as "Ode to Complexity" declare themselves great by the way in which they seem so universal, joyful, and intelligent. Humor and smarts makes this a good one to get for yourself and for others. Good for Caroline Knox, Dean Young fans.

Are you sick of those boring, polished, egocentric journal entries which have been passed off as "poetry" for the past 40 years or so? If so, check out MAINE -- the most dynamic, bizarre, unpredictable collection of poems to be published in several generations. At last: a poet not afraid to have a voice -- or actually, many voices! Avoiding the pitfalls of the various "schools" of poetry, Winter's sometimes wacky, sometimes disturbing persona poems are really out there -- in a good way. With total command of the English language and various poetic forms, this Outsider (where did he come from?) covers more ground than one would think possible in an 80-page book. There are sonnets, sestinas, odes, a whole section of ballads which reference points as disparate as Marshal Dillon, Handel's "Messiah" and icicles clinging to the limbs of frozen lovers... (In general, there is no shortage of erotic imagery in this book, and not the usual sort of Pablum that could have been written by a computer -- this stuff is strong, it's personal, and it's weird.) Geographically, Winter also covers a lot of ground, from New York to the Old West to utterly mythicized desert and northern landscapes. This is an amazing compedium of subject matter, emotions, dramatic voices, poetic approaches and lexicons. And with none of the usual "Me me me" obscurity which isolates most contemporary academic and "language" poetry from a potential readership, you will feel quite welcome in the airy rooms of these superbly original and accessible poems.

In their blurbings for the book, David Lehman and James Tate both write how Jonah Winter has fun with language, form and theme. It's true. He writes sestinas about cowboys, for crying out loud -- for once, content allowed to breathe new hilarious life via form, rather than being crammed into a form or restricted by that form. This is a New York-y book and a New York School-y book, hence Lehman's interest in it I suppose, but don't let that prejudice you. Winter is going in even more strange directions and talking about even more mundane/absurd people and places than O'Hara, Schuyler et al. Cool book.

I used this novel with my high school English class last fall. I teach in an urban environment where kids are reluctant to read, period. But I found that the students were REALLY into it. I had students who I suspect never read, reading it and telling me so. They kept saying, all year, "can't we read another novel like Mollyockett?".

It is told in flashback by the title character, Mollyockett, a medicine woman/weaver/wanderer, the last of her nation, the Peqwackets. She tells the story to a young English settler, Sarah. As she loses strength, Sarah tends to her and listens to her stories. For the most part, she tells the story chronologically... and she has an interesting life. Pat Stewart weaves the stories together seemlessly so that nothing seems forced or strange. If anything, she makes the reader want to know more about the real story.

We were lucky to be able to host the author at our school and she captivated the kids. Mostly, they wanted to know about Native American Medicine practices, since they were studying that as part of their unit, but many wanted to know how she actually wrote the story; she told them about the process of researching the history and making up parts she didn't know about. I still think some of the students had a hard time realizing that the story was based on the life of a real person!

It is rare to find historical, fictionalized accounts of Native Americans, and even rarer to find ones about Abenaki or any other New England Native American groups.

Anyway, I highly recommend this novel to teachers to use in their classrooms, but also to anyone who likes historical "fiction"... uhm, fictionalized history?

Basically, when we read fiction (or as in this case, fictionalized history), we want a story...the kind of story that in early times would have kept us listening to the storyteller until the tale was completely told. Pat Stewart's device, letting Mollyockett, the last of the Pequawkets, tell the story of her long life in the white man's world is just this kind of tale. It is clear that the author has carefully researched the life and times of her real-life character and that Mollyockett's story is based in fact. However, by taking some poetic license Stewart has been able to breathe life into Mollyockett, going beyond the facts and fleshing out the personal qualities and skills of this unusual woman. The result is a series of well-told tales that are revealing of both the storyteller's life and character, informative of the Native American history of New England, and revealing of the ambiguity of the French and Indian Wars. Avoiding the pitfalls of using any vernacular, Stewart has Mollyockett speak clear, almost poetic language. A storyteller herself, Stewart has faithfully produced a character that spins her own stories with a compelling, yet gentle voice that absorbs the reader. I recommend this book to readers of all ages who like good stories about real people and events that really happened.

In just 163 pages, Pat Stewart tells the story of Mollyockett, an Abenaki Indian woman who lived most of her life in the hilly country of western Maine. (Or, rather, bedridden in her final days and hours, Mollyocket tells her own story to a ficticious young gift descended from one of Andover, Maine's, first settlers).
What a remarkable story she tells--a tale of the struggle between native people and settlers, a story of this strong woman's own deep apirituality and faith.
Even the book design is distinctive, modeled after a purse which Mollyockett wove and which now belongs to the Maine Historical Society.
I recommend this slim, creative and engaging book as a fine way to meet one of our country's native ancestors.