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Family & Relationships. Nature. Nonfiction. HTML:From the New York Times columnist, a portrait of a family and the cycles of joy and grief that mark the natural world: "Has the makings of an American classic." â??Ann Patchett Growing up in Alabama, Margaret Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parentsâ??her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive fatherâ??and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child's transition to caregiver. And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worldsâ??the natural one and our ownâ??"the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love's own twin." Gorgeously illustrated by the author's brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut. "Magnificent . . . Readers will savor each page and the many gems of wisdom they contain." â??Publishers Weekly… (more)
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“Sitting on that front porch in the heat of an Alabama summer, with grasshoppers buzzing in the ag fields just across the road and bluebirds swooping off the fence posts to snatch them up, I considered the alternate future he was laying before me: a life of poems. It was a lifeline to a life.”
Renkl grew up in rural Alabama, surrounded by a loving tight-knit family. As an adult she relocated to the Nashville area. In these brief essays or vignettes, if you will, Renkl mines her life, examining the loss and grief, of her family members and the solace she finds in the beauty of the natural world. Either through her love of birds, butterflies, or a sun-drenched meadow.
There are also a smattering of gorgeous illustrations, by her brother, Billy, which makes the print book a necessity. Fans of H is For Hawk, Terry Tempest Williams, nature, poetry and wonderful prose, should pick up this book.
In "Imperfect-Family Beatitudes" she ends with "Blessed are the parents whose final words on
"One evening I looked out, and there in the growing twilight was a male scarlet tanager taking a drink. I had never seen one in this yard before, and I have not seen one since. But I think often of that beautiful bird, of the few seconds I could stand at my window and watch him taking drink of water in the gloaming. To me he looked like a blood-red, hollow-boned embodiment of grace.
Reading this book was like taking a trip with Margaret as she told us bits of her life while growing up in Alabama to becoming a wife, mother, and caregiver to her parents and in-laws. She writes about love, an imperfect but beloved family life, caregiving, loss and grief, fear, and motherhood. She cares so much and is very knowledgeable about nature. She tells us about her interactions with birds, bees, butterflies, flowers, and snakes. She sees the beauty in things that most of us ignore.
I was moved by her beautiful, poetic writing which held a lot of meaning for me. I read the hardcopy so I could see the gorgeous illustrations done by her brother, Billy Renkl. So much talent in this sister and brother team! Highly recommended with 5 Stars.
This book is a collection of short essays, some only a couple of paragraphs, assembling stories, memories, and experiences from her childhood in red-dirt Alabama to middle age and the departure of children from home and the loss of her own parents. Renkl is a fine, fluid writer, and her sensibilities for the living creation around her are awestruck and loving. When someone inquires "So you're a trained naturalist?" she must admit no, she's a Googler. But she declares: "the flip side of ignorance is astonishment, and I am good at astonishment." And she astonishes us, with a loveliness of ladybugs, a piebald fawn who appears on cue, the resurrection of a caterpillar, the death of a window-stunned cedar waxwing. These pieces are interspersed with intensely painful ones of aging, weakening, torturously ill, and dying family members; her own depressions and terrors; and grief. So much grief. It ends on a note of hope, as the monarch butterflies she has tried hard to attract make a late, unexpected appearance, weighing down the zinnias she has left standing in the yard. All told, the themes of life and loss and death weave throughout all the pieces, nature and human-focused, but the human misery rather weighs down the natural joy.
The writing is beautiful; the collage-like, almost Durer-esque illustrations by Margaret's gifted brother Billy are elegant and lovely. Still, the tone of the book may be exemplified by the exchange Renkl has with her disapproving neighbor about the clover. She explains she plants the clover for the honeybees. The neighbor tells her about a swarm of bees she saw recently, "a big ball of bees up in the crepe myrtle next to the garbage cans. It took a whole can of Raid to kill them."
Written by someone from Alabama and Tennessee, so that much of the wildlife is alien to me, but the clarity of the observations are easily transferable to my neck of the woods and joyful to read.
followed by the "pond is dying" - the starling hanging itself, dead dog...
WE GET IT! Without Death, there is no Life, yet do readers need to know this on every other page?!?
How about trying: Let's Love and Enjoy Life
She shows compassion only for certain creatures.
She does not lower herself to the soil to try to comprehend the beauty and insights of the rest.
She offers nothing for the mealworms who tuck themselves around her fingers,
hoping she will save them from her determined fate.
I gave up with their dead cockatiel pet and skimmed the balance of the rest: "monstrous in death...."