Wednesday

26 April 2017

— My hopping blackbird is back.

Good Morning All,

I have a bird-feeder pole in the rose garden. From its top, six hooked wires fan out and arc down like the ribs of an umbrella. From two of the hooks hang green nets in each of which is a ball of seeds and hard fat mixed together. From two other hooks hang green nets filled with shelled, uncooked peanuts. From the last two hooks are suspended half coconuts filled with that same seed/fat mix. Each of these items hangs about two feet off the ground.

Enter my enterprising blackbird. He likes to get under one of the coconuts, then jump/flutter up to stab with his golden beak at the fat, after which he searches around on the ground for whatever he has managed to loose. He’s been at it a half hour now, God love him!

I recently wrote my very first Amazon review. It was for a book by Ruth Rouff, the younger sister of a university friend. She’s written a few books for the Townsend Press's Young Readers’ Series, including Great Moments in Sports and a biography of Ida B. Wells, a courageous newspaper editor, suffragist, and one of the founders of the NAACP.

But Ruth is also a poet and a diarist/journalist whose work has been published in a great many of the more literary quarterlies and regional magazines. Last year, a publishing house in California collected some of her poetry and stories/journals into Pagan Heaven.

Of course I bought a copy ($7.99) since how can you not buy a copy of your friend’s kid-sister’s book? I was not expecting too much … and then … and then, I was very impressed!

Stephen, her brother, tells me she’d decided early in life to become a writer, but unlike virtually all of the rest of us who make that same decision, including me, she remained true to that dream and that desire. While writing and honing her craft, she’s taught in tough Camden schools, done educational editing and writing, worked in K-Marts, and who knows what else to pay the bills while she writes. 

I probably have not seen Ruthie since she was eight or nine, but she sure as hell has my respect.

Anyway, here’s my review:  Here in Denmark, it was my lucky day to come across Ruth Rouff’s Pagan Heaven. Slow reader though I am, I read it in one sitting, and the next day read it again, enjoying nuances I’d missed the first time, as well as trying to decide which I liked better, the spare lines of her poetry or her prose cut to the absolute bone. Her topics are the seemingly common occurrences of her (and your and my) daily life, coming to terms with the death of her parents, a vacation that did not succeed, siblings and social relationships, working at a K-mart, but--because she speaks with that rare courage of the gifted writer holding nothing back—those events and moments shimmer with vitality. With subtle humor and the sharpest of eyes, she does what an artist does: she does not reproduce what we see, but lets us see.

If any of you more suspicious types think I’m attempting to sell you a book, well, yes, I guess I am, but I do so strictly under the aegis of you’d be doing yourself a favor. Pagan Heaven. Ruth Rouff. You can get a hard copy or a Kindle copy from Amazon for under ten bucks. The Kindle version will arrive in under a minute.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron