Desert Hawk Books

Bone Deep in Landscape
Essays on Writing, Reading and Place

Mary Clearman Blew

 

197  pages
B&W Illustrations
Hardback

Quantity:   $22.95 & S/H

 

Great-granddaughter of homesteaders in north-central Montana, Mary Clearman Blew grew up in one of the last vestiges of the rural frontier. Her girlhood chores - hauling water and rounding up cattle - were remote even to her town-bred classmates in the forties and fifties. It was a girlhood she now recalls realistically, with affection but without nostalgia."--BOOK JACKET. "Many others have written about this land, its people, and its history, and Blew examines portrayals of the West in some of their writing, including B. M. Bower's Chip of the Flying U and the novels of Dorothy M. Johnson and A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

"These 13 essays envelope the reader intensely in place and experience. Blew (Balsamroot: A Memoir) intricately weaves stories about the craft of writing, womanhood, autobiography, history, literary criticism, landscape, and nature. Her precision of language allows the reader to feel the shimmer of the prairie near Havre, MT, or a bone-cold visit to a new home in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains with "those eighteen-inch sandstone walls" that "had absorbed the frost to their core and radiated it back like a deep freeze." While each essay stands alone, they combine to create a complementary whole that sets a standard for nonfiction writing. Readers will find this collection an excellent addition to other titles by Blew as well as books about a sense of place. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries.--Sue Samson, Univ. of Montana Lib., Missoula Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information." - Library Journal.
 
"I cannot reconcile myself to the loss of landscape, which for me often is an analogy for my own body.... And yet I know that I have never owned the landscape." In her second collection of essays (after All but the Waltz), Blew again demonstrates her artistry and strong connection to the Western terrain of her past and present homes in Montana and Idaho. In "Crossing the Great Divide," she recounts the trip she took with her daughter across the Bitterroot mountain range when she fled from her marriage in Montana to begin a new life in Idaho. Blew is particularly adept at interspersing personal anecdotes with accounts of historical events; she vividly evokes the perilous journeys that Lewis and Clark and the Nez Perc Indian tribes made across the same mountains. Concern for the future of her beloved landscape is reflected in "The Exhausted West," in which Blew details how settlers such as her grandparents helped open the pristine Montana paradise to greed, erosion and disease. "Mother Lode" is an informative analysis of the work of several Montana women writers, including B.M. Bower (Chip of the Flying U, 1904) and Dorothy Marie Johnson (Buffalo Woman, 1978). This is an immensely enjoyable collection." - "Publisher's Weekly.