U.S. Authors - 20th Century - Literary Biography, Regional Studies - Northeast & Middle Atlantic U.S., Maine - State & Local History
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Overview
Twenty Years of Reconnoitering in the dooryards, workshops, and woodlots of his neighbors come to fruition in Temple, George Dennison's sustained meditation on life in rural Maine. Often lyrical, his close observations on the changing New England seasons are themselves like miniature paintings. But Temple is also a gritty portrait gallery of a people and their values, both as they exist today and as they were in the not very distant past. "I love these old ones," Dennison wrote, "who knew a way of life and have virtues and are dying." Dennison takes us to visit Eddie Fontayne, the French-Canadian woodworker who carves fiddles as well as axe handles and fumes over his failing eyesight. We meet Esther who has spent her life and her limited resources in caring for her fellow creatures, human and non-human. And Mr. Fife, the blacksmith and backroad eccentric, who surely knows the best way to do everything, from pruning trees to frying leeks. And Dennison returns again and again to the recurrent theme that underscores the precariousness of all this natural and human abundance - the loggers, the men who work in the woods, the most dangerous of local callings, with their scarred faces, missing limbs, blinded eyes, and their helpless anger at the human forces - both business and government - which they cannot control but upon which they now grudgingly depend. Like James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Dennison has written a social history of a place. But Temple is much more; it is both a celebration and a lament for a self-reliant American culture that is now vanishing.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
After Dennison ( The Lives of Children ) died from cancer in 1987, poet and translator Gardner and author and editor Stoehr, friends of Dennison, compiled this collection of his journal entries and neighbor profiles. The book is a celebration of small-town life in Temple, Maine, though most interesting here is the author's ambivalence in struggling with his relocation from New York City and his longing for his lost political and artistic life. Dennison was a writer of considerable power, with a clear eye for character and an intensity that reveals itself in staccato description and unself-conscious voice. It is unfortunate, however, that he died before he could shape these excerpts more narratively, for the descriptions and profiles as presented become repetitive. (June)Ray Olson
What Dennison intended to be a comic epic about the little Maine community to which he repaired after 20 years' unsatisfying existence as an urban bohemian is a sad book but only in that it's a fragment on account of his 1987 death. It's made up of extracts from Dennison's journals as well as his interviews with old male neighbors, some of the last of generations of rural New England men who had to know all kinds of things about farming and mechanics in order to live in any comfort at all--once fairly commonplace knowledge that now seems almost magical because of its particularity to certain persons. Besides their knowledge, Dennison saw deep virtues and the attractions of their sometimes craggy personalities. His profiles of these men--counterpointed by the observations of nature, his own small children, younger neighbors, and his dogs and sparked by occasional flares of social and literary criticism--are real literature that reward reading, rereading, and pondering. (Two of Dennison's too few books of fiction have been reissued by Steerforth in one volume--"Luisa Domic and Shawno", paper, $12 [1-883642-49-3]--in tandem with "Temple".)Book Details
Published
December 1, 1994
Publisher
Steerforth Press
Pages
194
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781883642228