Peace at Heart: An Oregon Country Life (review)

208Fourth Genre Dunn refers to these works as prose paragraphs rather than prose poems, but since each one is a single paragraph long, that limit makes them feel like stanzas—Uttle rooms, enclosures that raise the compression and intensity of the pieces to the level ofpoetry. They are reflective and meditative, but they move at the speed of handbaU rather than a walk in the park. Riffs and Reciprocities describes the action perfecdy. Each paragraph has aU the improvisatory gUnt and play ofajazz solo, and that energy is shaped and ampUfied by its opposite number on the facing page. The form here, the entwined prose pairs, is powerful because it iUuminates the way we construct and reconstruct the world the live in, defining something by saying what it is not. This can lead to endless hairspUtting but can also—as in Riffs and Reciprocities—bring out the best in us: an openness to ambiguity and complexity, empathy for other points ofview, and a wiUingness to live with ambiguity and uncertainty. The last piece in the book, "Acceptance," sustains this balancing act from its opening sentence ("Certainly not ofthings as they are . . .") to its concluding paradox: "FaU down seven times, stand up eight." Reviewed by Sharon Bryan Peace at Heart: An Oregon Country Life by Barbara Drake Oregon State University Press, 1998 192 pages, paper, $15.95 Growing up on a Midwestern farm surrounded by corn and soybean fields and plagued by poor weather patterns and unlucky chance taught me that smaU-time farmers do not work the land solely for profit because profit is rarely had. As a child I never questioned what possessed my father to come home from his dayjob as an accountant and spend endless hours in the barn or in the adjacent field. As an adult living in a city, that question now occupies my mind. In Peace at Heart:An Oregon Country Life Barbara Drake ponders the connection between humans and their natural environment. Her essays look at the aspects ofcountry Uving that continue to propel her away from the comfortable city home in which she used to Uve and toward "Muck and mud and midnight lambings." In 1987, despite a lack of farming knowledge or experience, Drake and her husband BiU purchased Lilac HuI farm, a twenty-acre parcel of coastal land that contained a patchwork house, an overgrown chicken coop, and a ramshackle barn, aU of which needed extensive work. Drake writes in the Book Reviews209 preface that "when my husband BiU and I moved to the farm, there was a feeUng ofhaving come fuU circle. I recognized the sweet smeU ofalfalfa and sheep's wool as if I'd been born in a barn. At the same time, I was gifted with that sharpening of senses that comes when things are whoUy new and unfamüiar." Biting into wüd apples, keeping honeybees, and purchasing baby gosUngs from the local feedstore are new occurrences for Drake, yet she encounters them with immense curiosity and an earnest desire to learn about the environment in which she now Uves. She explores these experiences in essays Uke "Wild Apples," "Hiving the Swarm," and "The Goose Chronicles." The essays in Peace at Heart do not convey a chronological story but instead thread together a mixture of factual information and personal accounts to capture moments when lessons are learned and a deep sense of awe or happiness is felt through the recognition of breathtaking Oregon landscape and personal connection with surrounding animal life. Far from being completely idyUic or nostalgic, her topical essays possess humor and detaüed descriptions that also caU attention to the less romantic side offarm Ufe. Droughts threaten to deplete already low weUs, and animals do not always act in a predictable manner. "Lamb," the opening essay, details Drake's first encounter with a problem birth. With no past experience to draw from, she relies on the advice of other farmers, how-to books, and personal observations to help her raise sheep. When Drake notices that Amity's delivery is not proceeding as it should, she turns to a weU-worn sheep manual claiming, "For people raised on farms and around animals, such...