Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains

Believe Jim Harrison's endorsement: this is outstanding prose. It is probably the best I, too, have yet read, and I plan to read it again. In an age of so many one-read books, I find this a comfort.I bought CHOKECHERRY PLACES specifically to read on a recent train trip around the country; I pulled it out only when we were crossing those bowed sky-span spaces of the plains, and relished the reading. I could gaze out the window to the North Dakota buttes that on one of Gilfillan's visits "were taking on that homesick evening-sun look, and I was thinking, I suppose, of erosion and atrophy and wash-away and large, charged events vanishing."This book reminded me of the potential that lies within words; it is elegantly crafted writing that rests in the mind like a heartfully prepared, home-cooked meal rests in the belly. Gilfillan writes with such detail and grace you'd think that nature itself, his subject, was italicized.