Earth Memories
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Earth Memories is a wonderful collection of essays by the English writer Llewelyn Powys. These ‘love letters to the English Countryside’ manifest throughout great depth of nature lore and observation hand in hand with the author’s own personal pagan creed and commentary on places, people and things.
This edition, which was first published in 1938, includes an Introduction by the American literary critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Van Wyck Brooks.
“Wherever Llewelyn Powys has lived, his mind has always turned towards England, the homeland that haunts him like a passion. Under the stars in the African jungle, poring over Robert Burton, whose rhythms have left long traces in his style—a style that is often archaic and always rare in texture—he dreamed of English gardens. In New York, in the clattering streets, he would see the cuckoo perched singing on the top of Sandsfoot Castle. He can always regain serenity, he says in one of his essays, by thinking of the playground of his childhood, the pear trees of Montacute Vicarage. High as his fever may be, the memory of this enchanted ground quiets his pulse in a moment; and his pictures of England suggest the eye of the convalescent, as if the world had been reborn for him. They are full of an all but miraculous freshness.”—Van Wyck Brooks, Introduction
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this charming collection of short essays, Powys (1884 1939) returns to the English countryside of his childhood and explores its wildlife and his past with sharp insight and moving lyricism. In 1909, Powys was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis and moved to a Swiss sanitorium. In 1931, after two decades of travel, he returned to his home region of Dorset County and wrote the pieces collected here. They reveal a keen observer of the natural world, whether he is marveling at the design of a hedgehog, spying on two butterflies mating, or describing an encounter with a seabird that fell victim to an oil spill. His polished prose can occasionally become mannered, but Powys shows an ability to evoke nostalgia without sentimentality. His work might strike some contemporary readers as old-fashioned, but it also has continuing relevance as a celebration of nature's wonder and a gentle reminder of the joys of being alive. "Nothing is of consequence," he writes, "but the fugitive fulfillment of each separate existence which has had the good fortune to be called, even for a few moments, into the light of the sun."
