RED: Passion and Patience in the Desert by Terry Tempest Williams

Abstract

B o o k R eviews 1 2 1 here [he explains] is your basic gravel-pit granola mixed with petroleum product. . . . Your yellow cake is a chunk of old highway’ [he adds]” (194). For Westerners in need of enlightenment on just how this waltz between nature and humanity may end, Meloy has no final answers. She does, however, make it impossible for her readers ever again to take her desert homeland for granted. RED : Passion and Patience in the Desert. By Terry Tempest Williams. New York: Pantheon Books, 2001. 258 pages, $23.00. Reviewed by M elissa A . Goldthwaite Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia Terry Tempest Williams dedicates RED: Passion and Patience in the Desert to both a group of people (The Coyote Clan, “individuals who are quietly sub­ versive on behalf of the land” [25]) and a place (America’s Redrock Wilder­ ness— 9,286,640 acres of proposed wilderness and national park service lands in Utah). Diverse in terms of genre, RED’s mix of story, essay, list, tribute, and tes­ timony demonstrates the personal and political ground upon which Williams stands. Providing a model of what it is to be both artist and activist, Williams en­ courages readers of western American literature and those who share a passion for particular places to “recall the transformative power of wildness and remem­ ber it survives now only through vigilance” (17). The power and beauty of the places she describes and of her own writing draw attention to the exigency of political action. Williams’s writing foregrounds the importance of questions, which she seeks to answer indirectly through her prose. Below are some of the questions she asks: ♦ “How are we to find our way toward conversation?” (3) ♦ “How do the stories we tell about ourselves in relationship to place shape our perceptions of place?” (4) ♦ “How can I learn to write out of my own experience, out of my deep love for wild country, while still maintaining a language that opens minds rather than closes them?” (11) ♦ “What do these places have to say to us as human beings at this point in time?” (68) The questions become a kind of poetic catechism not of religious faith but of a belief in the need to commune and communicate with people as well as places. Such communication, Williams implies, necessitates passion and patience. “Earth,” “Water,” “Fire,” “Air,” “River Music,” “The Bowl,” “A Woman’s Dance,” and “The Erotic Landscape” reveal a desire for connection and intimacy. Other essays acknowledge the fact that intimacy requires time and attention; in “Ode to Slowness,” “Home Work,” “Buried Poems,” “Perfect Kiva,” and “To Be Taken,” Williams deals with the “slow art of revolutionary patience” in creating change 122 WAL 37.1 SPRING 2002 (98). And in yet other essays, Williams pays tribute to voices that have informed her own— particularly Mary Austin’s and Aldo Leopold’s. Through chronology and collage, this varied collection of writings shows connections among the natural, spiritual, poetic, and political. Those who have read Williams’s previous books will find the themes and story-essays in RED familiar. Much of this book has been published before in Coyote’s Canyon (1989), Desert Quartet (1995), and various literary journals. However, the echo of familiar words— this time published without accompany­ ing art work— in the context of newer essays, a politically timely and candid introduction, and informative appendices take on a new urgency, becoming a tribute to beauty and a call to action. While many have heard these stories and themes before, they’re worth hearing again— and worth acting upon. Celebrating the Coyote. By Barbara Waters. Denver, Colo.: MacMurray & Beck, 1999. 320 pages, $20.00/$ 16.00. Reviewed by Frances M . Malpezzi Arkansas State University, State University Barbara Waters’s memoir is a celebration of her husband, author Frank Waters, who had been an honorary member of the Hopi Coyote Clan, and a celebration of that inner coyote that sustains us as we endure and cope with the loss of a loved one. With degrees in psychotherapy and journalism, she presents a highly readable introspective account of life with and without her husband. As Frank Waters’s fourth wife...