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FALL QUARTER By Weldon Kees Fiction Story Line Press $18.95
On a fall afternoon, several hours before he was to be drafted to fight in the Second World War, a young man named William Clay sat in the day coach of a train that traveled between Chicago and Kansas City. He watched the conductor going up the aisle to remove small pieces of pink cardboard from the metal clamps above the seats as sun-baked and desolate farmland gave way to a village, a general store with tin signs advertising flour, tobacco and female remedies, a bank with boarded-up windows, an unpainted church. Two dogs were fighting in the middle of the main street.
EIGHTY ACRES: ELEGY FOR A FAMILY FARM By Ronald Jager Nonfiction Beacon Press $15
Michigan is the low-lying bed of an ancient sea. New Hampshire is a thin layer of soil halfheartedly covering a large and obstrusive chunk of granite. The granite is even older than the sea. Whenever I reflect on the wide and spare landscapes of Michigan, I can't help comparing them with the near and jagged horizons of my part of New Hampshire. Ever and again when I return to Michigan, the first and overwhelming fact that strikes me, intimating a presence more than visual, is the persistent flatness of that land. From the wrist where I enter the state, I drive for three or four hours to my destination at the second knuckle of the ring finger, and I hardly find a wrinkle. The scenes that unroll are smooth and fair, and there are no surprises.
LICORICE By Abby Frucht Fiction Graywolf Press $18.95
No noise. Just shadow. In a fraction of a second, I'm scared. But it is only a flock of geese. White-bellied with black-bordered wings, they fly close to the tops of the quiet trees like a single, giant kite. Ordinarily, snow geese don't come here-they fly north to the marshes surrounding the power plant, now defunct, or east to the flats where they vanish among tall reeds. Here, the bodies of water are simply too small, the fish miniscule. The geese swoop low over the reservoir, then soar over the woods out of sight. Gone, they might have been a gust of wind, leaving ripples on the water.
SAINT CROIX NOTES By Noah Adams Essays Norton $18.95
It's overcast, almost foggy. Down in the kitchen, the cat wants in, the dog wants out. I go into the garden to gather some marigolds. They smell sweet, raspy somehow. In this light their yellows and deep reds are almost incandescent. I can understand why movie directors like to film on gray, overcast days. I make some coffee and think about fresh apple cider. The first taste of fall. We are coming fast into good apple time. We'll try to make some jelly this year, and certainly will make applesauce-pale, golden, chunky-lots of different apples to choose from and blend. I've tasted the Beacon apple already-it's an early ripener-tart and summer fresh. There is an apple named State Fair, with harvest dates August 18th through the 25th.
