Description
Richard Hague’s exquisite book of essays, Earnest Occupations: Teaching, Writing, Gardening, and Other Local Work is an exploration through layer upon layer of literary paleontology, anthropology, and archaeology. It begins with the very soil beneath our feet, “as we sift it through our fingers…we sift…a living and vividly present community astounding in its diversity and numbers.” From the local quiet of “back doors and back yards” and “slouching and loafing places,” Hague’s writing expands out into a substantial volume that maintains that “the coalescing of atoms, molecules and movement into crickets, kremlins, moons, thrushes, earthworms, grocery stores, and [us]–is a set of stories.” The vision here comes from Whitman and Thoreau and rises through such contemporaries as Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. His poetic prose “includes wasps and lard and zeppelins, that makes [us]… weep–not sadly, not sentimentally, but reverentially, gratefully.” Here in the words and memories of a poet, teacher, husband, and father is an excavation of time and place, bringing the reader, at last, from gravitas to grace. –Christina Lovin, author of Echo: Poems, and A Stirring in the Dark In this work, he tells us how it’s done. In page after page, we are challenged to envision “life’s ever-unreeling enlargement and complication,” on the page, in the places of our work, and in the ground on which we stand. The result is this marvelous compendium of Thoreauvian cantankery, Appalachian contrariness, and resonant spiritual insight. –Michael Henson, author of The Maggie Boylan Stories.
