Reading the Mountains of Home by John Elder.

2/5 rating. 237 pages.

Book #33 of 2022. Read August 5, 2022.

This is a literary analysis of the Robert Frost poem “Directive” and its interplay with Bristol, Vermont. After reading this book, I don’t know that I really gained anything besides some descriptions about the Bristol area, and the realization that John has a much higher regard for this random poem than I do.

Frost lived very near Bristol for a time, and so John explains how you can trace this poem in the surroundings of this area which he also calls home. He traces some of the trails that Frost followed, while weaving his understanding of the poem into aspects of John’s life.

John finds ways to relate the happenings in his life to a lot of things that he reads into Frost’s words. While I certainly am no poet and therefore probably am missing all of these allusions and ideas Frost is bringing up, John inferring about 5 levels deep of thought from a line of poetry seems like a lot.

There were many beautiful descriptions of the woods in here and it is good to see the emotions and thoughts poetry can bring about in people, but I think I just didn’t really “get” this book.

Quotes:

“At the poem’s heart is a meditation about getting lost enough ‘to find yourself’ in Vermont’s surprising woods.”

“In the West, where I grew up and where so many tenets of the environmental movement originated, wilderness has been viewed as a diminishing resource, constantly pushed back by the tide of human settlement. But northern New England is far wilder today than it was a century and a half ago. We’ve gone from being almost three-quarters cleared to being more than three-quarters forested since the mountains were depopulated.”

“Wilderness here has always been a vector, never a steady state.”

“Where can the wholeness of life be found when the hills of childhood are subdivided?”

“But only time and distance, and getting lost, let them discern the message.”

“Just as we read within the context of all the other books we’ve read, so too the meaning we find in any poem always reflects the specifics of our own time and place.”

“The loss of one good thing may be the start of something else, as long as that wave, too, comes to its crest and slides on through.”

“Journeying, as Eliot said, becomes a way for us to return to the place we started ‘and know it for the first time.’”

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