Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest
by Ellen Meloy
I can’t do justice to this elegant work; all I can do is explain how I reacted to it. The alternating subjects—beauty of the desert vs. violence of the atomic bombs that were developed and tested there—kept me alternating between wanting to read deeply and savor every turn of phrase...and wanting to skip past the awful stuff. Atomic explosions—the suffering they caused and will go on causing for as long as we likely will exist as a viable species—don’t make for good reading. Or thinking about.
And so I confess to skipping and skimming, a lot. But when I would suddenly hit upon a passage of heart-lifting beauty, I’d be deep into it; lost and not wanting to come back up for air.
I suspect people will fault her writing for being disjointed and somewhat random in coherency and flow. But that’s the way this sort of nature writing is supposed to be. It’s poetry—no, it’s better than poetry, because poetry is bound by a rhyme and a rhythm. Her writing springs from the rhythm of nature—long, slow pauses, bursts of action, and crash! of flash floods in the arroyos.
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