Roorbach (Big Bend) takes readers on a journey in and around Temple Stream, which flows by his 1874 home near Farmington, Maine, about 40 miles northwest of Augusta. He records a series of forays along his stream, observing subtle environmental clues: the mix of trees, the types of garbage, the attitudes of local beavers, the varieties of birds and wildflowers. Sometimes his wife or their newborn baby accompanies him, sometimes neighbors, but more often just his two dogs. His essays on his perambulations sometimes include a dramatic incident-encounters with mountain man Earl or with the aptly named Ms. Bollocks-but usually there's just a single golden thought: for example, seeing caddis fly nets, he remembers calling them "wind socks" as a boy and then recalls a feeling he had, 40 years back, of being "late for dinner, all alone in his canoe, drifting homeward." Some themes thread through these essays: the progress of home improvements, his wife's pregnancy, his messages-in-a-bottle miraculously returned, his charting of Temple Stream back to its mysterious source. Roorbach's obvious delight in obscure phrasing-"streamside omphaloskepsis," "callipygian cowgirl"-should please literate stream walkers who enjoy a good browse in their dictionaries after a day's wander in the woods. Agent, Betsy Lerner. (Aug. 2) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Since his 2000 debut, Roorbach (Summers with Juliet; The Smallest Color) has been deservedly lauded by the likes of Jay Parini and Richard Russo for his fiction and nonfiction alike. Here Roorbach chronicles a decade in the life of his family, from 1992, when he and his wife bought a house outside of Farmington, ME, to the birth of their daughter. He deftly documents his exploration of the stream itself as well as his neighbors. One of the book's best characters is Earl Pomeroy, a Temple Stream native with a knack for "always [knowing] when [Roorbach] was up to something embarrassing"-as only the best neighbors do. There are other autobiographical books about Maine (e.g., Linda Tatelbaum's Carrying Water as a Way of Life and Louise Rich's We Took to the Woods), but Roorbach's writing is so immediate and compelling, his eye for the human condition so keen, that this is in a class of its own. An enjoyable addition for academic and public libraries.-Felicity D. Walsh, Emory Univ., Decatur, GA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
A quest for the headwaters of a small stream in Maine becomes an obsession bound up in a celebration of life. Writer and sometime novelist Roorbach (The Smallest Color, 2001) begins his narrative as a teacher at Ohio State who finds himself, along with his wife Juliet, longing to be at the summer home they are refurbishing near Farmington, Maine whenever their inconveniently separate careers keep them away from it. This is a dilemma; so is the fact that her biological clock is ticking, yet the professor (now Contemporary American Letters, Holy Cross) is fixed on the idea of finding the source of Temple stream, a nearby "pocket paradise [of] birdsong and beaver work." But there are obstacles, like the moose-sized Earl Pomeroy, a lumbering (in all senses of the word) local who develops into Roorbach's fated nemesis-and firewood supplier-beginning with his colorfully articulated theory that yuppie academics on research sabbaticals are somehow ripping off honest taxpayers. His initial confrontation with Pomeroy crystallizes the Down Maine antipathy that anyone from "away" will immediately recognize-a friend will later explain that even after 30 years' residency, he and his wife are still regarded as "full-time summer people." Sourcing Temple Stream goes on, however, summer and winter, the author dragging his canoe past beaver dams and paddling long-abandoned millponds, crossing the same ponds frozen on cross-country skis, consulting flawed antique maps, etc., until the objective is finally reached. In the meantime, a baby girl arrives and Earl Pomeroy gets ugly. Rich and colorful language flows, too, as Roorbach notes that the local Walmart has "metastasized" to a Superstore in only a fewyears, and at another point a cluster of teenage boys arrives on scene "looking like they'd just said yes to drugs."Deft and evocative, making small adventures loom joyfully large.
With a voice as pure and true as the stream itself, Roorbach limns a lyrical yet precise portrait of the life teeming along one deceptively simple yet richly essential part of the natural world.
Roorbach has a knack for tapping into deep undercurrents and bringing them to the surface with the least amount of fanfare or fuss.
Roorbach falls, for me, into that small category of writers whose every book I must read, then reread.
Here is a narrator who makes you glad to be alive, giddy to be in his presence, grateful to love friends and family and dogs with generosity and abandon, to show tenderness and thus be saved by strangers,
While genuine in his appreciation of Nature, Roorbach is the antithesis of the smug and self-absorbed Naturalist...Temple Stream is a moving book: thoughtful, precise, about much more than flora.
There is poetry in Bill Roorbach's prose...his lyricism touched lightly with irony.
Bill Roorbach is a brilliant guide to the natural world. Gracefully combining deep knowledge, lyrical description and wry humor, his writing draws you out of your chair and into a world of streams and meadows and trees and bugs and beavers. And it makes you want to stay there.
You'll be homesick for a place you've never visited.
You'll be homesick for a place you've never visited.
With a voice as pure and true as the stream itself, Roorbach limns a lyrical yet precise portrait of the life teeming along one deceptively simple yet richly essential part of the natural world.
Roorbach has a knack for tapping into deep undercurrents and bringing them to the surface with the least amount of fanfare or fuss.
Here is a narrator who makes you glad to be alive, giddy to be in his presence, grateful to love friends and family and dogs with generosity and abandon, to show tenderness and thus be saved by strangers,
—Melanie Rae Thon
Roorbach has a knack for tapping into deep undercurrents and bringing them to the surface with the least amount of fanfare or fuss.
