The Land's Wild Music by Mark Tredinnick

Author:Mark Tredinnick [Tredinnick, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595340931
Publisher: Trinity University Press

Drama in the Great Basin, by contrast, is inherent. It waits to spring. The crust of that country is being stretched by the movement of the plate on which it sits. Tension runs through it, has thrown up its ranges and pulled down its basins. Its skin is thin and it threatens to break open, fracture, change the face of things, lay open its heart. Occasionally it does, and steadily another part of the sagebrush ocean rises, another sinks. Power and danger here lie barely hidden; they live within the earth, just below the surface. The Wasatch Mountains are the most easterly range in the province of the basin and range. Terry and her family grew up digging into the soil of that country, a country coiled tight with life waiting to articulate itself.2

Terry’s prose has always been alive with a quality like that of the basin, too. A book like Pieces of White Shell has about it the same restrained, deceptive calm. It’s a composed and quiet sedition, a revolutionary plot hatching underground. Its surface is still, but it feels as though it is drawn thin, as though at any moment it might fracture and give rise to a sudden range. The surface does occasionally give, in that book; and what arises is a story, some magic, a revelation—and then the calm of the sage resumes. In her later writing, she lets the country (now mostly the more voluble plateaulands) rise in weirder shapes, in the daring, edgy phrasing of Leap and the more recent essays of Red. In these pieces her prose surrenders more to the drama of eternal re-creation that she sees written about her now in red—but it does not surrender completely. Even in the more daring works, including Desert Quartet, the skin that holds the body of her text remains taut with a habit of civility and poise, learned in the basin, practiced in a Mormon home.

Until Leap (and possibly still), her life, like the basin, contained fundamental tensions, and you felt them in her prose. In her case, the tensions were not tectonic, but they may as well have been. She was, she once said, a “radical soul in a conservative religion” (quoted in Anderson 1996, 973). As Lorraine Anderson puts it, “She is . . . a feminist in a patriarchal religion, an environmentalist in one of the very few American religions that in the 1990s has not embraced ecological values, a woman who has been arrested for civil disobedience in a religion that holds obedience to civil authority as an article of faith, a childless woman in a protonatalist religion” (ibid.). She is a sensualist, an eroticist, in a society that frowns on the body’s desires. All these years she has harbored these contrary forces, just as the Great Basin has harbored its tensions. She made a jump in the end and became, if not a range, then a plateau.

In his book Basin and Range, John McPhee travels into the Great Basin with geologist Kenneth Deffeyes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.