Chapter 11: Indian Summer
This book is a long prose poem, full of imagery, compressed, lyrical, sonic. Just to highlight its beauty, I formed a sentence found on page 106 into a poem by adding line breaks, removing transitions, adding and removing propositions, and substituting a common name for a scientific one (pteropod). But no. Her writing works best as she intended, as prose. Let there be no doubt of her mastery. Like Dickens, Austen, and Dickinson, her work remains fresh almost a century later.
What a Mackerel Sees
The early light lay in level rays
across the water
swarms of winged snails
[in] a hazy bluish cloud dimmed
the mackerel’s vision
but when the sun had been
an hour in the sky
its rays came slanting
into the sea and the water
filled with sparkle and glitter—
transparent snail bodies
exquisite as the finest glass
p. 106
Scomper escaped death numerous times in this chapter. What an epic his life is! Will he, like Hector in the Iliad, meet a predestined death in these pages, or will Carson spare us and leave Scomper among the algae, protected for now?