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The Meadow
An American Library Association Notable Book
In discrete disclosures joined with the intricacy of a spider's web, James Galvin depicts the hundred-year history of a meadow in the arid mountains of the Colorado/Wyoming border. Galvin describes the seasons, the weather, the wildlife, and the few people who do not possess but are themselves possessed by this terrain. In so doing he reveals an experience that is part of our heritage and mythology. For Lyle, Ray, Clara, and App, the struggle to survive on an independent family ranch is a series of blameless failures and unacclaimed successes that illuminate the Western character. The Meadow evokes a sense of place that can be achieved only by someone who knows it intimately.
In discrete disclosures joined with the intricacy of a spider's web, James Galvin depicts the hundred-year history of a meadow in the arid mountains of the Colorado/Wyoming border. Galvin describes the seasons, the weather, the wildlife, and the few people who do not possess but are themselves possessed by this terrain. In so doing he reveals an experience that is part of our heritage and mythology. For Lyle, Ray, Clara, and App, the struggle to survive on an independent family ranch is a series of blameless failures and unacclaimed successes that illuminate the Western character. The Meadow evokes a sense of place that can be achieved only by someone who knows it intimately.
240 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1992
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September 21, 2012
"If Lyle said he heard stars he heard stars."
April 25, 2011
"Often I am permitted to return to a meadow..."
This is a quiet, thoughtful read for those of us who have a strong heart connection with the high sagebrush country of the inter-mountain West. It follows about a century's-worth of people's doin's in a mountain meadow at 8,500 feet in southern Wyoming. The life requires great hardiness and ingenuity to withstand the isolation and trials of snow, wind, fire, hunger, disease, and financial uncertainty.
The book is beautifully and heartfully written, but be forewarned. It's essentially plotless, and non-linear in the extreme.
It took me most of the book to figure out that it's "faction." The Jimmy Galvin of the novel is the author, and the other characters are clearly fictionalized versions of people he knew well. The central character, Lyle Van Waning, is just too real (and lovable) to be a complete fabrication. The book jacket illustration is attributed to Clara Van Waning. That's evidence enough for me of a connection with real life.
James Galvin is best known for his poetry, and that poetic bent really comes through in both his dialogue and his artful word pictures of nature's beauty. He makes some striking comparisons that created powerful images for me, such as when he describes a sunset "turning the sky as many pastels as you see on the side of a rainbow trout."
If you have a soft spot for Colorado and Wyoming and you enjoy reading about ranch life, give this one a try. Be sure to have your copy of Hamlet on hand so you can check up on Lyle's observation.
This is a quiet, thoughtful read for those of us who have a strong heart connection with the high sagebrush country of the inter-mountain West. It follows about a century's-worth of people's doin's in a mountain meadow at 8,500 feet in southern Wyoming. The life requires great hardiness and ingenuity to withstand the isolation and trials of snow, wind, fire, hunger, disease, and financial uncertainty.
The book is beautifully and heartfully written, but be forewarned. It's essentially plotless, and non-linear in the extreme.
It took me most of the book to figure out that it's "faction." The Jimmy Galvin of the novel is the author, and the other characters are clearly fictionalized versions of people he knew well. The central character, Lyle Van Waning, is just too real (and lovable) to be a complete fabrication. The book jacket illustration is attributed to Clara Van Waning. That's evidence enough for me of a connection with real life.
James Galvin is best known for his poetry, and that poetic bent really comes through in both his dialogue and his artful word pictures of nature's beauty. He makes some striking comparisons that created powerful images for me, such as when he describes a sunset "turning the sky as many pastels as you see on the side of a rainbow trout."
If you have a soft spot for Colorado and Wyoming and you enjoy reading about ranch life, give this one a try. Be sure to have your copy of Hamlet on hand so you can check up on Lyle's observation.
March 21, 2016
I am having a hard time writing this review, because this book is so spare, so intricate, so spellbinding that I struggle to find the words to give even a minimal conception of the scope and breadth and depth of it. Other have done a better job than I ever could.
From Publishers Weekly:
These ragged sketches of ranch life along the Wyoming-Colorado border depict the author's neighbors--hardscrabble folk--in wry, stoic stories of skill, survival and loss that flash back and forth across 100 years of the high meadow's history. The author's style of lyrical reserve is sufficient to preserve Lyle, Ray, Clara and Appleton in prose amber, but he is too respectful of Lyle to press him on why his sister Clara left the ranch and blew her brains out. The prose soars only in descriptions of weather in the meadow, of Lyle's ax work and Ray's machinery. Still, there is spare beauty here, and readers of Richard Ford, Jim Harrison and Rick Bass will feel at home in Galvin's country.
From School Library Journal:
A true story that reads like a novel, its focal point being a piece of land in the Neversummer Mountains on the Colorado-Wyoming border. In a series of vivid vignettes and short sketches, the author records the 100-year history of the meadow and the few people who lived and died there. His description of every facet of life there, its seasons, the weather, the wildlife, is so evocative that readers can easily understand why its inhabitants care so much about it. This fine piece of regional writing will recall the land and people of the American West to anyone who has been there, and introduce them to those who have not. It is a book that would grace any collection.
From Publishers Weekly:
These ragged sketches of ranch life along the Wyoming-Colorado border depict the author's neighbors--hardscrabble folk--in wry, stoic stories of skill, survival and loss that flash back and forth across 100 years of the high meadow's history. The author's style of lyrical reserve is sufficient to preserve Lyle, Ray, Clara and Appleton in prose amber, but he is too respectful of Lyle to press him on why his sister Clara left the ranch and blew her brains out. The prose soars only in descriptions of weather in the meadow, of Lyle's ax work and Ray's machinery. Still, there is spare beauty here, and readers of Richard Ford, Jim Harrison and Rick Bass will feel at home in Galvin's country.
From School Library Journal:
A true story that reads like a novel, its focal point being a piece of land in the Neversummer Mountains on the Colorado-Wyoming border. In a series of vivid vignettes and short sketches, the author records the 100-year history of the meadow and the few people who lived and died there. His description of every facet of life there, its seasons, the weather, the wildlife, is so evocative that readers can easily understand why its inhabitants care so much about it. This fine piece of regional writing will recall the land and people of the American West to anyone who has been there, and introduce them to those who have not. It is a book that would grace any collection.
April 26, 2017
Like a series of prose poems—simply gorgeous!
November 19, 2010
This deeply moving book for all I know is a classic. I read it eighteen years ago when it came out, have only now re-read it, and as with all classics, I rather hope I've learned more from it in re-reading than I did the first time around. The Meadow is about several things, but first it's the story of Lyle Van Waning and the community he helped form on the high ridge of the Continental Divide, the region called Boulder Ridge and Sheep Creek Meadow in the border area between Wyoming and Colorado. This community, still inhabited by the author and other families represented here, lives at an altitude of 8,500 feet, and so is subject to five-month long winters of circumscribed movement, while the book's central figure, Lyle, higher still off the main road, chooses to provide for himself, hermit-like, for those five months of the year. Galvin is writing about the men who brought him up: Lyle, but also the son of one of the founding families on the mountain, Ray Worster, Frank Lilley, and in much deeper foreshortening, his own father, who ranches in the area but seems to have been scoured from this narrative, as the author's mother is -- entire. Galvin wants to tell the history of this place from the early part of the Twentieth century to the late eighties, and he uses the lives of Lilley, the App Worsters, and the Van Wanings to do it. The project is Faulknerian, and Galvin imagines these earlier lives (Galvin himself was born in the early fifties) in chapters that move -- quite accessibly, really -- between the past and the present; between, that is, the fictionally re-created, the orally transmitted, and the authorially witnessed: a non-fiction book with no reason not to honor the imaginative rendering of the area's founding, a myth which allows Galvin to write in a style with equal footing in Faulknerian self-argument, and Twainian tall-tale-telling.
The book, for all its reverential attention to Lyle, is also concerned to give us the man who is something of a child-man, of that gentleness, which in another context Galvin defines as "that elite society of people who, because defective in a certain way, go through life without hurting anyone." So, Lyle, for example, a master craftsman, makes violins, and earrings, which get put away, at his house, into boxes and drawers -- because, it seems, Lyle's "defect" is in the social nature that would psychically draw him into a relationship with another human for whom such a gift could have meaning. To whom would such a gift as the violin not be too rare? This heartbreaking poignancy is rendered by the contrasting reciprocity and gift exchange through which Lyle helps people (the author, e.g.) onto the mountain, and (tourists, etc.) off it. Lyle's living is from hay baling and the rent from cattle pasturing on his land; everything else he gets from others -- it seems -- for free, and in exchange for the enormous amounts of work he himself gives away for free. Galvin's thinking about the relation of these kinds of economies of reciprocity and craftsmanship (e.g., the earrings) for which there may very well be no eros at all -- this I find one of the joys of the book this time through. Galvin's own living in both the world of the ridge community as well as in his own craft -- the prose tuning itself against Twainian hyperbole throughout -- reflects both his gift to the memory of Lyle as well as his elegy that insists Lyle's way of life may not, as it seems, die with him.
The Meadow moves in short bursts of thought, and Marilynne Robinson on the back cover is quite right to note that "Its language reenacts the discipline through which wilderness refines consciousness." About Lyle Van Waning, one is reluctant to generalize, other than to say that somebody ought to write a book about him. Our reluctance owes itself to Galvin's own refined consciousness, a lyricism that renders these short essays full of gracenotes, as when, in one short essay, Lyle is watched as he hays the meadow, a coyote trailing ten feet behind, pouncing on field mice. Galvin writes: "A lot of people would shoot a coyote if they got that close to it, which is why a lot of people never get that close." Here the refinement of Twainian hyperbole aphoristically tailors us to Lyle's adaptation to his own scene: "As the price of defiance they [coyotes] have to work harder than most animals just to stay alive." The resemblance here is between Lyle and the coyote, but we would not see the connection without the author's own act of attention, which elsewhere he insists is the value most necessary to Lyle's adaptiveness. This attention is the meaning of the tall-tale telling Galvin enacts when he tells us of Lyle's aid in helping the author build his own house on the mountain. On the one hand, Lyle does not want the responsibility for helping the ephebe build his house; on the other hand, he can't help but attend to what's going on around him (the author and Lyle live about a mile away from each other), so he ends up advising and then pitching in to help Galvin raise the roof's top logs into position -- work Galvin admits he would not have been able to do himself, and so he wonders aloud to Lyle how Lyle managed to do it on all the houses Lyle has built; Galvin, like Twain in his Jumping Frog tale, sticks with the enigma: "'You know, Jim, I've often wondered that myself'," Lyle answers.
The book, for all its reverential attention to Lyle, is also concerned to give us the man who is something of a child-man, of that gentleness, which in another context Galvin defines as "that elite society of people who, because defective in a certain way, go through life without hurting anyone." So, Lyle, for example, a master craftsman, makes violins, and earrings, which get put away, at his house, into boxes and drawers -- because, it seems, Lyle's "defect" is in the social nature that would psychically draw him into a relationship with another human for whom such a gift could have meaning. To whom would such a gift as the violin not be too rare? This heartbreaking poignancy is rendered by the contrasting reciprocity and gift exchange through which Lyle helps people (the author, e.g.) onto the mountain, and (tourists, etc.) off it. Lyle's living is from hay baling and the rent from cattle pasturing on his land; everything else he gets from others -- it seems -- for free, and in exchange for the enormous amounts of work he himself gives away for free. Galvin's thinking about the relation of these kinds of economies of reciprocity and craftsmanship (e.g., the earrings) for which there may very well be no eros at all -- this I find one of the joys of the book this time through. Galvin's own living in both the world of the ridge community as well as in his own craft -- the prose tuning itself against Twainian hyperbole throughout -- reflects both his gift to the memory of Lyle as well as his elegy that insists Lyle's way of life may not, as it seems, die with him.
October 25, 2014
Written about the men I admire most--tough, gritty old timers hesitant of outsiders who are more attached to a land than a people--this is less a novel than a chaptered narrative of prose poetry, some of the richest language I've ever read. There are paragraphs that kept me up at night, and entire chapters that will haunt me for as far as I can see. I don't know that I've ever read anything else as beautiful.
July 19, 2017
A lovely, quiet read. A beautiful evocation of place and time. Galvin offers gorgeous description and heartful, longing characters whose unrequited love for this piece of land lingers from one generation to the next.
September 28, 2010
Read this book the first time back in 2000, and though I liked it, didn't really see it for what it is. Reminded of it by a friend, subsequent re-reading brought me back to a place I'd somehow forgotten. The West I once knew. Like a landscape looked on fleetingly once upon a time, the return visit revealed vistas that went unnoticed before. I can smell the warm pine and fresh cut hay. Flaming sunsets over fir silhouetted ridge lines in winter are painted vividly as are winding dirt roads meandering through green-gray sagebrush flats. Accompanying such imagery is the raw emotion and complete devotion felt by those melded with the contours of the western landscape. Conveyed with a poetic style of prose sublime and beautiful as the place it describes. If you haven't seen Colorado James Galvin will show it to you.
Re-reading THE MEADOW has put me on a Galvin kick I have not satiated, prompting me to explore his poetry like an addict. And a fine addiction it is.
Re-reading THE MEADOW has put me on a Galvin kick I have not satiated, prompting me to explore his poetry like an addict. And a fine addiction it is.
April 28, 2009
Technically this book is a sort of memoir/historical non-fiction, but it reads like fiction. The style of writing blew me away with its simple but strong prose that vibrates with calm intensity. Galvin's writing is almost like Hemingway, short episodes, almost unrelated at times, that jump back and forth through time. Galvin tells the story of this Wyoming meadow through his own eyes and the recounted (and author-embellished) stories of several stolid and vivid Western men. After reading this, I got the sense that Galvin wrote these stories to preserve them, not to rail against how time changes or how much we lose when certain people die but just to show that those stories, those people, existed. The content and style of this book are truly beautiful.
September 28, 2020
Set in the mountains that border Colorado and Wyoming, Galvin paints a landscape and a way of life as he weaves together the lives of several generations of ranchers. The literary merit of this short novel kept me reading, although I found the shifting time periods and narrators confusing.
October 12, 2023
A wonderful narrative history of a region along the Wyoming/Colorado border in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. It is also a biography of two of the author's much older neighbors.
It was written by a poet, well done with lots of imagery. The prose reminded me of my own rural upbringing and all the people who have come and gone from my life.
4.5 stars
It was written by a poet, well done with lots of imagery. The prose reminded me of my own rural upbringing and all the people who have come and gone from my life.
4.5 stars
February 1, 2015
I loved this book. It is part memoir about living in the high country on the Wyoming –Colorado border. The people have lived there since the 1930’s and 1940’s or before, building their own cabins and their own lives, and now it is the 1970’s and 1980’s but life is still very much the same – maybe just a little easier. The main person in the book is Lyle and there was much about Lyle that reminded me of Roy. Here is one quote about Lyle that could almost be about Roy (p143): “ He liked having the power tools he'd designed himself and made from scraps - two lathes, three drill presses, a table saw, joiner, planer, lapidary saw, grinder - but unless you were setting up for a really big job, most things were just as easy to do by hand, if you knew what you were doing and kept the tools sharp.”
I live in the West and have lived where we had to pump water, and cut wood, and make fires, and deal with winter and snow and getting in and out. There was much in the book I identified with. It was gentle and respectful and told in simple language. A gift for me.
I live in the West and have lived where we had to pump water, and cut wood, and make fires, and deal with winter and snow and getting in and out. There was much in the book I identified with. It was gentle and respectful and told in simple language. A gift for me.
March 24, 2011
Reading a book like this is such a treat, a real pleasure. I loved this book, the writing is absolutely exquisite. I felt so drawn to all the characters, especially Lyle. I just couldn't get enough of him. One of the most interesting men in any book I've ever read. Galvin's description of the landscape and the changing weather evoked such beautiful images. I've given this four stars rather than five because I had trouble with the changing of time frames. It stopped the flow for me when I had to figure out what year it was. When I finished reading this it was hard to close the book as I didn't want to leave these people and their land behind. There are some books I've read that I give away but this one will stay in my collection. It's a real treasure.
December 29, 2013
The Meadow is an extraordinary book. James Galvin is a poet and this part novel / part biography reads almost like an epic poem with each chapter as a new verse. Weaving back and forth in time and from character to character, the meadow of the title remains at the core of these people’s lives. The land is harsh, beautiful and unforgiving but it demands so much from App, Ray, Clara and Lyle who are a family determined to keep their land and remain fervently independent despite blizzards, tragedy and city developers. If you’ve ever visited the Never Summer Mountains and seen the stunning landscape found up there, you might just about understand the symbiotic relationship they have with their meadow and it has with them.
January 2, 2016
This was one of my men's book group choices. It is nice to have the opportunity to read a book you would never have chosen to read. The book describes a hundred years of survival on a remote ranch at 8,500 feet on the Wyoming - Colorado border. Learn what it would be like to have to be self sufficient and of hardy stock. Very few people today could think of undertaking such an effort. Take a look at this book. If you read it, you will be glad you did.
November 14, 2013
Why do we love living in Wyoming? Well, it's likely you wouldn't understand and we couldn't explain it. Galvin knows and he captures it here. I know the people in this book. I've never met them, but I know them. I know the people, the places, the weather, the scenery. A must read. A masterpiece.
July 15, 2014
What a gem! A thoughtful, gentle homage to a place and the people who share it, especially a clever old codger named Lyle. I'm trying to read all sorts of books set in the West and this one has pulled me into a Montana meadow so seductively I don't want to leave.
April 3, 2020
When I started reading this book I was quite sure I'd like it; Galvin writes good prose, but I was wrong. This is the history of a place he calls the meadow, but it's more a history of people who hav lived on it. The biggest problem with this book is that it is scattered. By that I mean he writes about different people from different eras and times and mixes them all up like a jumble--this can work well at times in fiction, but to do it this much in a book of history makes no sense. I read it all in one afternoon/evening, so I could remember who was who. While I understand that when writing a history of an area about different people there will be some overlap of time, this jumps around like a Mexican jumping bean. What's more, it ends in a very odd place. Not only did I get to the last page and wonder why on earth of all the things in the book, Galvin opted to end here, the person who left pencilled notes in this used copy wrote a note at the end asking why he ended with that story.
This jumping around ended up making the book somewhat boring for me a times. Also, I think I have had my fill of books like this even when they have a better layout for the histories and stories of the people.
Bleah.
(not blah--they aren't quite the same)
This jumping around ended up making the book somewhat boring for me a times. Also, I think I have had my fill of books like this even when they have a better layout for the histories and stories of the people.
Bleah.
(not blah--they aren't quite the same)
April 22, 2021
This short novel depicts a mountain meadow that spans the Colorado-Wyoming border and the stalwart people who lived there for several generations. They will be with me for quite some time.
"Between the sky and the egg-shaped, egg-smooth granite boulder that floats out in the middle of the meadow's widest field, everything has its own green: cattails, willow leaves, the flip side of an aspen leaf, the gray-green sage, the yellow-green native pasture, the loden timber, all circling around, with that boulder at the center, as if the meadow were a green ear held up to listen to the sky's blue, and there is an axis drawn between the boulder and the sun . . . The granite boulder is only there to hold it down.
"Between the sky and the egg-shaped, egg-smooth granite boulder that floats out in the middle of the meadow's widest field, everything has its own green: cattails, willow leaves, the flip side of an aspen leaf, the gray-green sage, the yellow-green native pasture, the loden timber, all circling around, with that boulder at the center, as if the meadow were a green ear held up to listen to the sky's blue, and there is an axis drawn between the boulder and the sun . . . The granite boulder is only there to hold it down.
April 15, 2021
This was my third read of The Meadow. The first came when the book was new (before I moved West); the second came perhaps a decade later when I wanted to revisit the book's unusual shape and compelling mood. This time, a younger writer I know asked me why he hadn't heard of The Meadow before. I didn't have a smart answer to his question, but I did pull the book off my shelf. I was sure the language and setting would entrance me again. They did. They do. But what makes this unusual memoir/testimony/collage work on a broader level? I'm not sure I have a perfect answer. Galvin's love for Lyle and Ray, his admiration for their skills and solitude, matters a great deal. His memories are the glue. Also, as a gifted poet, Galvin doesn't fall into the trap of trying to explain everything--not the history of settlement along Sheep Creek, or the tangled relationships among distant neighbors, or the motives of stubborn, wounded men. Instead, he relies on stories, many of them mere narrative nuggets: dramatized scenes, remembered anecdotes, diaries, interviews. And he allows the many pieces of the puzzle to assemble themselves into a greater whole--a compelling whole with many intentional gaps. I find the book lovely and strange, mournful and thoughtful. It's meditative structure is, for me, a lyrical strength.
January 9, 2021
A vivid, patient book. Packed to the brim with detail and a near scientific history of the mountains that straddle Colorado and Wyoming.
James Galvin works magic with The Meadow, and he successfully weaves together multiple strands of family history. This book is technically a novel, but it pulses with a frictionless reality.
I struggled with the intersecting timelines and shifting narration. I found myself only connecting to Lyle and Clara, and the other characters drifted out of my enthusiasm. The book also focused so heavily on details that I frequently got lost in descriptions of farming tools, building activities, and livestock behavior.
I have a hypothesis that the book is narrated entirely by an abstracted version of James Galvin. Maybe this is obvious to others and I’m late to the party, but I found myself struggling to figure out who was talking to me and how/why they were involved.
This was one of those literary experiences where I could tell something revelatory was happening but that I personally wasn’t clicking into it. I recommend this book if you like poetry. It isn’t a plot-driven-page-turner, rather it’s something more serene and steadfast.
James Galvin works magic with The Meadow, and he successfully weaves together multiple strands of family history. This book is technically a novel, but it pulses with a frictionless reality.
I struggled with the intersecting timelines and shifting narration. I found myself only connecting to Lyle and Clara, and the other characters drifted out of my enthusiasm. The book also focused so heavily on details that I frequently got lost in descriptions of farming tools, building activities, and livestock behavior.
I have a hypothesis that the book is narrated entirely by an abstracted version of James Galvin. Maybe this is obvious to others and I’m late to the party, but I found myself struggling to figure out who was talking to me and how/why they were involved.
This was one of those literary experiences where I could tell something revelatory was happening but that I personally wasn’t clicking into it. I recommend this book if you like poetry. It isn’t a plot-driven-page-turner, rather it’s something more serene and steadfast.
July 21, 2009
Mmmm, wow. The same wonderful friend who gave me "Autobiography of Red" tipped me off to poet James Galvin's novel-length effort. Although effort is probably the wrong word, as it implies to me that perhaps the effort wasn't successful, where instead, "The Meadow" is partially fictional, fully poetic, and totally wonderful. I read it with Edward Abbey in mind--Galvin chronicles the lives of several generations of farmers on a singular meadow on the Wyoming-Colorado border, and he also earns himself a spot (in my mind, at least), in the handful of writers who really capture this part of the country I now find myself living in. Galvin's pace is slow, and a hasty reader could be fooled into thinking nothing's going on. Instead, I think the real beauty of the book is how reverently Galvin captures the spirit of his friends and neighbors--their strength and willingness to make the best of the everydayness of life.
Want to read
July 5, 2014Inspiration to read: NYTBR interview with Colum McCann June 22 21014. He says "'The Meadow' defies classification - it's a memoir, a scrapbook, a novel and a poem rolled into one. For my sins I live in New York City, and reading about Gavin's landscape calms me and brings me elsewhere. "
August 3, 2017
One of my all-time favorite books--though far from any traditional form of novel or memoir...but such richness of language and place.
April 21, 2023
Like memories, non-linear, sometime bubbling up unbidden and frequently triggering another memory disjointed in time but not in mind.
January 6, 2023
Loved this book. Another book for my favorites shelf.
October 15, 2014
This is the memoir of a Place, the play of Nature's moods, and the lives of people who settled in "The Meadow." The remote location is a high valley surrounded by tall pines, red cliffs, and streams on the border of Colorado and Wyoming in view of the jagged faces of the Medicine Bow mountains and Snowy Range.
The stories of the people--hermits and families--grow organically from the landscape and the effects of weather and climate. The Reader gradually learns the back stories of the characters as would a friendly stranger dropping by to pick up bits and pieces in conversation with the Meadow residents, slowly revealing the amazing happenings and tragic events that happened in the landscape throughout the years. The stories alternate randomly between first settlement in 1895 to the 1980's. There is a bit of jumping around, such as when the funerals of some characters precede stories of earlier events in their lives. But that's the way folks talk, and it's generally easy to distinguish the characters and the times they lived in.
One of my favorite stories was when early settler App set out on his horse during a snowstorm to bring some of his cows down from a mountain pasture. The snow was deeper than he expected, but he pushed on farther than he should have to find his cows. Eventually he noticed his legs were numb with cold, and then he spotted a stranded "antelope child," separated from its herd, in a hopeless, shivering condition. App rode slowly to the young animal, dropped his lariat over its neck, and pulled the antelope up onto his lap on the saddle. The warmth of contact was a win-win for both App and the young antelope. He took the critter home to his wife, where it became their household pet named Misty.
The writing is beautiful, serene and strong as the landscape, with descriptions and metaphors that arise as naturally as the rush of wind across the Meadow. As far as I can tell, the author wrote from his own experience and stories handed down. I have to admire the independence, ingenuity, and perseverance of the strong and wise settlers who lived so peaceably with each other and the wildlife in this remote, rugged terrain.
The stories of the people--hermits and families--grow organically from the landscape and the effects of weather and climate. The Reader gradually learns the back stories of the characters as would a friendly stranger dropping by to pick up bits and pieces in conversation with the Meadow residents, slowly revealing the amazing happenings and tragic events that happened in the landscape throughout the years. The stories alternate randomly between first settlement in 1895 to the 1980's. There is a bit of jumping around, such as when the funerals of some characters precede stories of earlier events in their lives. But that's the way folks talk, and it's generally easy to distinguish the characters and the times they lived in.
One of my favorite stories was when early settler App set out on his horse during a snowstorm to bring some of his cows down from a mountain pasture. The snow was deeper than he expected, but he pushed on farther than he should have to find his cows. Eventually he noticed his legs were numb with cold, and then he spotted a stranded "antelope child," separated from its herd, in a hopeless, shivering condition. App rode slowly to the young animal, dropped his lariat over its neck, and pulled the antelope up onto his lap on the saddle. The warmth of contact was a win-win for both App and the young antelope. He took the critter home to his wife, where it became their household pet named Misty.
The writing is beautiful, serene and strong as the landscape, with descriptions and metaphors that arise as naturally as the rush of wind across the Meadow. As far as I can tell, the author wrote from his own experience and stories handed down. I have to admire the independence, ingenuity, and perseverance of the strong and wise settlers who lived so peaceably with each other and the wildlife in this remote, rugged terrain.
November 8, 2017
Picked this one up last night after putting down another. I recently picked this up at our local library's book sale. I was attracted to the western setting. The author is primarily a poet and that fact gives pause, but I'm forging ahead and enjoying this. The prose can be a bit fancy, I guess, but that's to be expected and it hasn't put me off too much. The "plot" is pretty much non-existent as the author bounces around in history giving bits of history of the meadow and those who've attempted to eke a living from its daunting environment. The setting is the Colorado-Wyoming border and the Medicine Bow Range ... or the Never-Summer Range ...or both. Seems like they're kind of in the same place. There's been a bit about Boulder in the 1920's-30's, so that was cool.
- connections to Kent Haruf's books, Train Dreams, Annie Proulx' western stories, Honey in the Horn, Angle of Repose, Housekeeping ...
- Lyle's family moves to the farm in the meadow less than 20 years before we moved to Boulder(1957). Lots of changes during that time. Clara's diary selections are from only 8 years before we got there.
Moved up to Part II last night and I have to say that this book is definitely growing on me. If you love the west(not the "old" west) I think you(who ever you may be) will enjoy this. The Ferris saga is priceless. The west has plenty of clueless knuckleheads as well as the good people and great natural beauty the author describes. Then there's the story of post-war development. The whole front of the Rockies from Laramie/Cheyenne down to Colorado Springs is just getting overrun and trashed. Sad ...
Finished last night with this excellent book. The prose was lovely and NOT too poetic and vague, as I'd feared it might be. There is no plot to it, so don't expect that.
- 4.25* rounds down to 4*.
- connections to Kent Haruf's books, Train Dreams, Annie Proulx' western stories, Honey in the Horn, Angle of Repose, Housekeeping ...
- Lyle's family moves to the farm in the meadow less than 20 years before we moved to Boulder(1957). Lots of changes during that time. Clara's diary selections are from only 8 years before we got there.
Moved up to Part II last night and I have to say that this book is definitely growing on me. If you love the west(not the "old" west) I think you(who ever you may be) will enjoy this. The Ferris saga is priceless. The west has plenty of clueless knuckleheads as well as the good people and great natural beauty the author describes. Then there's the story of post-war development. The whole front of the Rockies from Laramie/Cheyenne down to Colorado Springs is just getting overrun and trashed. Sad ...
Finished last night with this excellent book. The prose was lovely and NOT too poetic and vague, as I'd feared it might be. There is no plot to it, so don't expect that.
- 4.25* rounds down to 4*.
June 3, 2017
I loved _The Meadow_ the first time I read it, but that was for a class during a packed semester, so it was naturally a rushed reading. This time the title came up - literally a name pulled out of a jar - in a book club. I enjoyed the second reading even more, having the luxury of enough time to enjoy it in leisurely snatches.
Galvin writes with such admirable attention to detail that I decided to read an excerpt from the book to my creative writing class as an excellent model of indirect characterization. The powerful images and drama in the episode kept a roomful of ninth- and tenth-graders silent and focused. After the reading, I asked them to tell me what kind of man App, the adult character in the chapter I read, seems to be; they were spot on because his actions in the episode had so clearly revealed him.
What is perhaps most impressive about Galvin's writing is the apparent respect he holds for the people about whom he writes. It's easy to observe and record a person's quirks and actions, but it is far more difficult to write about that complete person, flaws included, without demeaning the character. Galvin does it with grace. He writes from a position of love and admiration that reveals the truth without judging and in the process teaches the reader the value of looking deeper and being more tolerant of the flawed, occasionally bizarre, creatures who inhabit her reality.
Galvin writes with such admirable attention to detail that I decided to read an excerpt from the book to my creative writing class as an excellent model of indirect characterization. The powerful images and drama in the episode kept a roomful of ninth- and tenth-graders silent and focused. After the reading, I asked them to tell me what kind of man App, the adult character in the chapter I read, seems to be; they were spot on because his actions in the episode had so clearly revealed him.
What is perhaps most impressive about Galvin's writing is the apparent respect he holds for the people about whom he writes. It's easy to observe and record a person's quirks and actions, but it is far more difficult to write about that complete person, flaws included, without demeaning the character. Galvin does it with grace. He writes from a position of love and admiration that reveals the truth without judging and in the process teaches the reader the value of looking deeper and being more tolerant of the flawed, occasionally bizarre, creatures who inhabit her reality.
April 13, 2012
A poem. A song. An ode. To be read slowly. Savor the language. Savor how the short chapters - some just a sentence long - feel like an aperture that slowly opens, takes in the view whole, then closes. Then repositions itself and repeats.
Consider the relationships between environment and man, man and animal, man and man, animal and environment. Consider tools and how men employ them as an intermediary in their relationship with the environment. Consider the passage of time. Consider how time washes over man, how brief our time here is. Consider the immutability of the environment, but how man's relationship with the environment mutates over time. Consider the struggle of life.
Much to consider. Plan to read it again, but not until I find myself in my beloved West again.
A favorite passage appears early:
Tip: Because many characters are introduced and chapters jump back and forth in time, keep a note sheet of names and relationships for the first 50 pages or so. It will help until you get the lay of the land. Am I the only one that does this?
Consider the relationships between environment and man, man and animal, man and man, animal and environment. Consider tools and how men employ them as an intermediary in their relationship with the environment. Consider the passage of time. Consider how time washes over man, how brief our time here is. Consider the immutability of the environment, but how man's relationship with the environment mutates over time. Consider the struggle of life.
Much to consider. Plan to read it again, but not until I find myself in my beloved West again.
A favorite passage appears early:
He built miles of fences, yards of homemade wooden pipe, a house, barns, sheds, corrals. He put up hay with horses and got down to scythe among the willows where the mower couldn't go. He never quit from the last star to first, proving that the price of independence is slavery. (p. 11).
Tip: Because many characters are introduced and chapters jump back and forth in time, keep a note sheet of names and relationships for the first 50 pages or so. It will help until you get the lay of the land. Am I the only one that does this?
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