Sherry Chandler

Christmas books

On Christmas Eve, I received two just-published books. One I expected, the other came as a Christmas surprise. The books were opposites in every other way, too.

The book I ordered was Pilgrim Heart (Prairie Sky, 2005) by Brooks Carver, a sometime contributor to the conversation on this blog. Brooks is a romantic whose stories and poems of the Civil War era are sometimes reminiscent of Dickens and sometimes of Ambrose Bierce in “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge.”

In other writings, Brooks shows the appreciation of nature that grows in one who works the land. Such an appreciation shows up in his short story “Under a Wild Full Moon” that recently placed second in Heartland Review’s short fiction contest. It can also be found in his poetry. Here is “Afternoon Heavy with the Closeness of Rain”

Clouds churn and climb
On each other’s shoulders
Out on the western edge
Just beyond the tree line.

Deep throated grumbles combine
With flickering wires of lightening,
Glowing, stabbing at the ground.
Corn rows dance to hot puffs of wind.

One more pass down the field
On this old tractor.
My day is nearly done.
I can see the barn from here.

Pilgrim Heart is a gorgeously produced book. The cover is from a photo called “Boundary Line” that Brooks took of a cast iron corner post he found in a field up there in Illinois where he lives the life of a gentleman farmer. Very few of them left, he says, and I can believe it. I never saw such a thing but it’s a lovely photograph.

You can find more of Brooks’s work here and here

The surprise book was a collection of poetry from David Rogers’s Wavelength/Albireo Press. More about that tomorrow.

Related posts:

Christmas books II

Another good way to spend a little Christmas money

Buy Nothing Christmas

The BloggingPoet.com’s Thirty Days of Christmas

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