From the Publisher
Poet, writer, artist, and naturalist Emily Hiestand takes us to four far-flung corners of the globe - to Orkney in northernmost Scotland, to the Greek Islands, to Belize (formerly British Honduras), and to the Florida Everglades - and gives us some of the most sensual, learned, and witty writing about place to appear in years. Unlike male travel writers who tend to chronicle solitary adventures in exotic lands, Hiestand approaches travel as a companionable activity, often a journey toward those we love. "South of the Ultima Thule" tells the story of Hiestand's mother, avid birder and Presbyterian, who wishes to see the Arctic Skuas in the land of her faith. The two set off for Orkney, islands of fierce climate and neolithic ruins, and the journey gives mother and daughter a way to remember what they both hold dear. Hiestand's writing on the natural world reflects a keenly poetic eye; hers is a rare ability to make the ancient, human history of the land come alive. A houseboat trip on the Everglades Wilderness Waterway with her lover is occasion for a close look at swamp spiders and manatee, and for penetrating speculation on the ancient Calusa people, canoe-borne traders who occupied "a kind of subtropical Venetian world." Later, houseboat suddenly snagged, outboard motor whining ineffectively under marl (underwater sediment), radio inoperative, night falling, Hiestand shows her characteristic ability to remain wry in the face of the traveler's blackest moments: "The putrid smell given off by the slurry plume, now tingeing the whole immobile situation, suggests why, since Milton, poets have turned to marl to symbolize the torments of hell." Belize for Hiestand is a prelapsarian tropical paradise, yet one haunted by the ultimate ecological mystery: what caused the collapse of the great Maya civilization that once flourished in the rainforests? And Greece comes alive as a land of erotic proposition, as a place where true wealth can be found in a meal taken at a v
Patricia Hampl
In these fresh accounts of far-flung locations, Hiestand keeps returning us to the profound questions not of exploration, but of home. That is the book's great discovery: we're in this together, wherever we are.
Herald Miami
Hiestand is an award-winning poet, and her description of the spiders with
which she and Peter Dunn share a houseboat is spun, like a web, from
gossamer; her recounting of the couple's confrontation with a Glades
alligator...sends shivers scampering up the spine.
Monthly Staff Atlantic
"Hiestand is a truly good traveler--she enjoys the unexpected."
The Washington Post
Here is a dazzlingly different kind of travel book. And it's just in time too, for a genre that was in danger of running to ground in the old ruts. Deftly, Hiestand moves from specific physical observations to her big philosophical question: 'What is right habitation?' As she travels, she looks closely at our world and thinks hard about why and how we are to live in it. It is a rare experience.
Boston Globe
Categorizing The Very Rich Hours as a travel book seems at first an underestimation of its scope, but this tour de force of personal narrative is indeed an odyssey of sorts, a rich and rewarding literary journey told with the voice of a poet and the heart of a consummate observor. Hiestand has crafted a complex, yet elegant, naturalist approach to travel. This is a rare book, one that is astonishing fluid and keenly observant.
Robert Finch
The most exciting travel writing I have read in years. These pieces are, in
the best sense, world-views. The poetic eye is their greatest strength; or rather, a poetic sensibility and intuitive perceptiveness combined with a remarkably cultivated and civilized intellect. It is the full engagement of the narrator with her material that immediately pulls the reader in. Her fluid, rich style seems to reflect her Southern heritage, more in its expansive rhythms and slight formality, than in any phrases. The style is an expression of good manners, good intellectual manners.
Inquirer Philadelphia
Travel writing is a demanding genre. At its best, it is an exquisite mix of the personal, the philosophical and the factural-artfully propelled by vivid description. That's not an easy balance to achieve. But Emily Hiestand gets it just right in The Very Rich Hours.
Publishers Weekly
The exquisite prose and erudition displayed in these essays by National Poetry Series Award-winning poet Hiestand ( Green with Witch Hazel Wood ) may awe some readers as she brilliantly portrays four very different, far-flung localities. Their geology, history, and people are animated by an artist's vision, a naturalist's curiosity and an intellectual disposition. Accompanied for most of her travels by another ``middle-aged bookish woman,'' Hiestand explores the former Mayan stronghold of Belize--an environmentalist's unspoiled paradise inhabited by a rich mixture of people who have descended mainly from slaves of the colonial past. The fog-shrouded, windswept, rainy Orkneys, with their monolithic cairns and circles assembled by Neolithic humans, offer a stark contrast to the idyllic, sunbathed islands of Greece ``saturated with myth.'' The reader will long remember Hiestand's chilling and masterful account of her meeting with a ``primal'' Everglades alligator. (Oct.)
Library Journal
Hiestand won the 1990 Whiting Writer's Award and received a National Poetry Series award for Green the Witch Hazel Wood (Graywolf Pr., 1989). Her book is more than a collection of travel essays. For the armchair traveler, she opens a window into new cultures and people. She brings a keen intellect and intuitive insight into human nature, and her prose is both evocative and lyrical. From the swamps of the Everglades to the windswept Orkneys, she breathes life into both the countrysides she visits and the people she meets. And in these times of increased environmental awareness, her narrative serves as a painless but effective reminder that the earth is alive and that we are not just inhabitants but stewards. With its natural synthesis of poetry and prose with nature and culture, this volume provides a literary treat for the mind. Recommended for most travel collections.-- Jane Gilliland, Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh
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