Wolves & Honey

Narrator Bernadette Dunne faces the challenge of providing coherence to a cornucopia of short essays. She produces something almost poetic from the simple prose about natural things in the author's life. The topics skip from animals to memories to men in rapid change, sometimes from sentence to sentence. Time flits around like a butterfly, so Dunne's relaxed approach and soft, motherly voice provide continuity. Honey bees receive the most scientific attention; we spend a good amount of time hearing about their social behavior and importance in producing crops. A few paragraphs in Latin sound stilted, but the pleasant remainder will delight many. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

May 24, 2004
In this lyrical memoir, Morrow (The Names of Things
) muses on New York State's Finger Lake region, where she grew up. Her ruminations are loosely based on her memories of two men—one a trapper, the other a beekeeper—whose ability to connect with nature had a profound influence on the way she views the world. In a poetic narrative, she contemplates the natural history of the area and tells of the people who have inhabited it—the Seneca, spiritualists, fur traders, artists, scholars, scientists and nurserymen. Morrow goes beyond the obvious, allowing each observation to remind her of something else and searching for the inner meaning of words. The sight of a flock of crows, for example, reminds her of a poem by the Greek poet Pindar, and this leads to a meditation on what it means to be a poet. The apple tree, which grows so plentifully in the region, is a "talisman that one could follow through the layers of Finger Lake soil, through layers of memory and history," and this prompts thoughts on the Swedenborgian missionary John Chapman (known as Johnny Appleseed), spiritualism, the molecular structure of sweetness, Lucretius and the origin of apples in the mountains of Kazakhstan. Morrow's language is rich and sensuous, for she thinks like a poet. Agent, Tina Bennett.