![]() By which I really mean that she rejuvenates even the word-weary reader who-it can happen to the best of us-has succumbed, like Henry in John Berryman’s fourteenth Dream Song, to being bored by literature “especially great literature.” Maybe that’s part of her appeal: the way that her best work often comes in shapes and forms unencumbered by the protocols associated with great literature. ![]() ![]() Her first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, begins with the author waking “in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood.” A writer who never seems tired, who has never plodded her way through a page or sentence, she can only be enjoyed by a wide-awake reader. And waking up (coming into consciousness), remaining wide awake, leading “a life of concentration” rather than sleep-wading through life, have been her abiding concerns. A passage from An American Childhood ends with the characteristically brilliant image of a woman diving into water, becoming sealed in her reflection and wearing it “as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.” It’s Annie Dillard all over, that passage, that image. ![]()
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