The River
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A breathtaking mix of observation, prose, natural history, and art
We tend to look at landscape in relation to what it can do for us. Does it move us with its beauty? Can we make a living from it? But what if we examined a landscape on its own terms, freed from our expectations and assumptions?
This is what celebrated writer Helen Humphreys sets out to do in this beautiful, groundbreaking examination of place. For more than a decade Humphreys has owned a small waterside property on a section of the Napanee River in Ontario. In the watchful way of writers, she has studied her little piece of the river through the seasons and the years, cataloguing its ebb and flows, the plants and creatures that live in and round it, the signs of human usage at its banks and on its bottom.
The result is The River, a gorgeous and moving meditation that uses fiction, non-fiction, natural history, archival maps and images, and full-colour original photographs to get at the truth. In doing this, Humphreys has created a work of startling originality that is sure to become a new Canadian classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this unassuming but quietly affecting work, poet and novelist Humphreys (whose novel Afterimage won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize) examines the small portion of the Napanee River that runs near her cabin in eastern Ontario. Her mission "to write about nature as it was, not as I wished it to be" takes her on a remarkable journey into the worlds of the creatures whose lives intersect with this waterway. Serene in appearance, Humphrey's river is infused with danger, violence, and loss, home to treacherous whirlpools, fish-eating water snakes, and cast-off human belongings. In the past, the river attracted frog hunters and fishers; others came here to kill the herons whose feathers were once prized as adornments for women's hats. Humphreys artfully mixes vignettes about these individuals with historical research, archival photos, and artwork to show the many ways people have made use of the river and tried to tame it. Her own firsthand observations from years as a riverside resident focus more on the river's flora and fauna and its irrepressible wildness. Humphrey's spare and meditative text is perfectly complemented by Tama Baldwin's luminous, painterly photographs. Like the river itself, this work holds wonders below the surface for anyone willing to take the plunge.
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