Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.
For much of his life, Marc Hamer has tended the gardens of the enigmatic Miss Cashmere in the Welsh countryside, transforming the landscape in tweed jacket and tie without ever having once entered the house. In Seed To Dust: Life, Nature, and A Country Garden, he writes his way through the year, month by month, telling of the rich happenings of the earth but also of people--figures from the past, his wife Peggy, and the ancient but exquisite Miss Cashmere, a woman he loves, from a distance, after a fashion.
From a working class Welsh background, raised among hard men who teach him by their hatred that he does not wish to hate, with no education beyond the age of 15 and a subsequent period of homelessness, he works the earth, steeps in poetry, drinks whiskey, dances with his wife, references Seneca, Greek mythology, John Clare, Patti Smith.
“I don’t believe in any kind of God,” he writes; “if there is such a beast, he has horns and hooves and plays the pipes and doesn’t live in the sky, for us to look up to and worship, but underground, and pushes all the wonderful things out of the soil for us to admire, pushes us out into the world, then takes us back again to join the earth. A creator that gives us passion and music and lust: that’s my kind of deity, should I ever need one.”
The best nature writing is poetry, anthropology, philosophy, theology, without ever leaving the rich particulars of the natural world. Hamer writes in language that makes the earth resonant as a struck bell, so that the dried carapace of a seedpod or a storm or a hovering insect can ring out with mourning and praise, pathos and joy. The book tells many stories, but one of them is that of finding contentment in a world of loss, change, and violence, a world of which he writes, echoing that ancient truth of Heraclitus, “Everything changes, and only changing stays the same.”
This book holds deep wisdom, about the earth and about the parts of earth that we are. It is that rare book that is hard to write about because one just wants to reproduce it, quote by luminous quote, upon the page. As I read I marked passages I wanted to return to with slips of paper, until about halfway through it bristled with bookmarks like a porcupine and I gave up, resolving just to go back and read the whole thing again.
You'll find Seed to Dust at your local library or independent bookseller.
Up next week: Kari Meutsch or Kristian Preylowski of Woodstock's Yankee Bookshop
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