Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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RobinWren217, September 5, 2011 (view all comments by RobinWren217)
Dillard's lovely book, first published more than 35 years ago, can rightly be called a classic. It remains even now one of the most beautiful works in a genre that includes Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. From PILGRIM: "We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence. . . . 'Seems like we're just set down here,' a woman said to me recently, 'and don't nobody know why.'" Dillard at the time did not call herself a naturalist but an observer. Oh, but Lord, what an observer, and what a writer! Before we were all learning to value the present, she was right there in it, up close, watching. Time and its passage seemed to meant nothing to her, not if Lethocerus, the giant waterbug, happened to catch her attention as it slurped down a soup of frog. I admit that I was reluctant to read PILGRIM, I had heard too many paeans to Dillard's book and as an amateur naturalist myself was certain that it would either disappoint or offend with what in those days (the 1970s) I feared would be "hippy-dippy" nonsense. I was wrong, completely wrong. Read the book. If the writer was young, she was wise beyond her years, but more important, she was not trying to say anything, only to look and to watch and to ask questions. She did it brilliantly, with writing that has not lost any of its power or beauty over time.

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tessilou41, October 5, 2008 (view all comments by tessilou41)
This is one of the most captivating and lovely books I've ever read. I came across it in 1990 when a friend was thinning out her books before a move, and she gave it to me. Since then, including several moves of my own -- the last one to Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico -- I have held on to this book, given copies to friends as gifts, and recommended it to others. I try to re-read it at least every year or so.

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Jane Churchon, September 14, 2008 (view all comments by Jane Churchon)
I don't like nature writing and Annie Dillard sold me on it, or at least her brand of nature writing.

Dillard is a poet, and from the first page, in which she uses iambic pantameter and internal rhyme to tell a story, she establishes her power over the language. SHe doesn't flaunt this--only readers looking for her crafts skill and twists would find them--but she uses them to shape a narrative about topics as varied as floods, bugs that suck the frog body from the frog skin, snakes, goldfish, the actual topography of land, preying mantis sex and feeding habits (one and the same) and the joy of each season.

Structured like Thoreau's Walden Pond, Dillard freely borrows from his beginning, and makes the book her own. Dense, whimsical and fact based, she wrote this from years of her own notes about books she'd read. She talks about blindness and sight, survival and adaptation, shelter and exposure. All while making puns or pouring poetry onto words that would otherwise remain scientific and dull.

Read this book for a brain exercise and for the excursion it provides into rural Virginia and the greater world beyond, in the animal and plant kingdom of our planet.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780060915452

Author:

Dillard, Annie

Publisher:

HarperPerennial

Location:

New York :

Subject:

Nature

Subject:

Essays

Copyright:

1988

Edition Description:

1st Perennial library ed.

Series Volume:

82(11.103)

Publication Date:

1988

Binding:

Trade Paper

Illustrations:

Y

Pages:

271 p.

Dimensions:

7.98x5.32x.70 in. .45 lbs.