- Paperback: 144 pages
- Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); 8th edition (Dec 3 1986)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0140081135
- ISBN-13: 978-0140081138
- Product Dimensions: 19.7 x 12.9 x 1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 141 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#318,616 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #27 in Books > Travel > United States > States > Wyoming
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
"Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still." Whether she's reflecting on nature's teachings, divulging her experiences as a cowpuncher, or painting vivid word portraits of the people she lives and works with, Gretel Ehrlich's observations are lyrical and funny, wise and authentic. After moving from the city to a vast new state, she writes of adjusting to cowboy life, boundless open spaces, and the almost incomprehensible harshness of a Wyoming winter:
"When it's fifty below, the mercury bottoms out and jiggles there as if laughing at those of us still above ground. Once I caught myself on tiptoes, peering down into the thermometer as if there were an extension inside inscribed with higher and higher declarations of physical misery: ninety below to the power of ten and so on."
After experiencing the isolated life of a sheep herder, she writes, "Keenly observed the world is transformed. The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient."
Ehrlich's gift is one of subtle precision. She writes beauty into the plainest of thoughts and meaning into the simplest of ideas: "True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere." --Kathryn True
From Publishers Weekly
Like many before her, poet Gretel Ehrlich discovered the therapeutic qualities of the West. In 1976, a time of personal crisis, she moved from the East to a small farm in Wyoming where she ultimately found peace of mind and inspiration. Originally, she had gone west to make a film for PBS; she returned to work with neighbors at cattle- and sheep-ranching, taking pleasure in open spaces. Ehrlich writes with sensitivity and affection about people, the seasons and the landscape. Whether she is enjoying solitude or companionship, her writing evokes the romance and timelessness of the West. November
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
It's May and I've just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep-sheltered from wind. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
It's May and I've just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep-sheltered from wind. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A love affair with Wyoming,
By
This review is from: The Solace of Open Spaces (Paperback)
Gretel Erlich was a poet and filmmaker when she first came to Wyoming in 1976. She was so taken with everything about the place that she became a cowherd, which gave her time to write about the American West. Reading her books, however, is very much like seeing a film, for her filmmaker's eye and awareness of nuance and gesture is evident in the way she chooses her words.In The Solace of Open Spaces, Erlich presents us with an eclectic bunch of frontier characters that she met while working as a ranch hand. Almost unaware of what's been accomplished, we readers find ourselves shedding former stereotypes of these people in exchange for seeing them for what they are: unique, quirky, interesting, inexplicable men and women. The Weather (and the word deserves that capital letter, as you'll see upon reading the book) plays as large a role as the people in Ehrlich's book. About the title: When she arrived in Wyoming, Erlich was grieving the death of someone important to her. As she works hard at physical labor, meets new people, falls in love with the land, and sheds her past like sweat running down her back, healing from grief occurs - although she doesn't exactly say this. Altogether, a beautiful book and a wonderful read.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Better Has Been Written,
By Santiago Foolish (Upper California) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Solace of Open Spaces (Paperback)
I'm going to catch flak for this, if only because looking at others' reviews I realized that this is the lowest the book has gotten. This is mainly because the people who read it are the people who want to read it, and so they like it, unless they're from Montana, in which case they like it but call it too one-dimensional.The major problem with this book is that it takes a single theme and doesn't go anywhere with it. There is no progression or movement in its somewhat flimsy premise--to quote the opinion of a man I respect: "The book is in bits and pieces--some of these bits and pieces are good, others are just...bits and pieces. It feels all of her friends told her to write this book, she wrote some bits, showed them around, had somebody read and like them, and then a publisher gave her a check and said 'finish the book'." The insight provided by this book is debatable, given that she approaches the reality of Wyoming with a desire to reshape this in literary form to fit her notions of theme. There is some good imagery. There is also some wasted space, some disjointed incompleteness, and a sense that the book, as thin as it is, is wasting space by refusing to allow for more complex and varied explorations. -SLiGH
5.0 out of 5 stars
The West seen through a filmmaker's eye,
By
This review is from: The Solace of Open Spaces (Paperback)
In these essays about Wyoming, the imagery of mountain and plain and weather calls to mind the sweeping landscapes of John Ford movies. Ehrlich, born and raised in California, retains her outsider's eye for detail, and is able to translate the perspective of someone trained in documentary filmmaking very effectively into the medium of words.Her portrayal of the men who work in this environment is very different from the stereotypes we know from Marlboro ads, "Bonanza," and movie westerns. She finds cowboys often tender-hearted, quirky, and curiously courtly. Not to be outdone by the men in this world of extremes and hard work, the women she meets and befriends are tough-minded and independent. Completing her picture are the Native Americans, whom she portrays respectfully and with an ironic appreciation for incongruity, as they both recover and reinvent a lost heritage. Hers is also a personal story. Beginning with the wrenching death of a close male friend, it recounts in her growing love for Wyoming and its people the discovery of a new life. And while her book is no heart-on-the-sleeve display of pain and recovery, one senses at almost every step the healing process that underlies the words. As slender as a book of poems, this volume of essays calls out to be read slowly and savored, word for word.
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