From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place ISBN: 9780815653769 Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Syracuse University Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters Subjects: Middle Atlantic; Women''s Studies; Geography;
``I have never really belonged to an American landscape,'' declares poet and essayist Tall ( The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island ) at the outset of this well-observed meditation on the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, to which she moved in 1982. Shifting between personal observations and literary/historical reflections, she describes her attachment to a place both beguiling and benighted. ``Geneva has many of the griefs of a city . . . but none of the advantages,'' she laments, but as she ruminates on the importance of a home, she finds comfort in the natural beauty around her. Though Tall is a fluent guide, her memoir suffers from a certain bloodlessness: her search for home seems mainly a mental construct, with a paucity of human characters. In the end, when she reports how her family, seeking a ``more lively, responsive human community,'' has moved to the nearby college town of Ithaca, we sense what she has left out. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Deborah Tall (1951-2006) is the author of five collections of poetry, and two prose works -- a memoir of her life in rural Ireland in the 1970s , The Island of the White Cow , and a book-length lyric essay, A Family of Strangers, about history, silence and family secrets. For many years, she taught writing and literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and edited the literary journal Seneca Review .
