REVIEWS
The Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize the Everglades, and Greece, Emily Hiestand (Beacon Press, 1992)

The Boston Globe, 1992
Review by Fiona Luis

A tour de force — “Categorizing The Very Rich Hours  as a travel book seems at first an underestimation of its scope, but this tour de force of personal narrative is indeed an odyssey of sorts, a rich and rewarding literary journey told with the voice of a poet and the heart of a consummate observor … Hiestand has crafted a complex, elegant, naturalist approach to travel... This is a rare book, one that is astonishing fluid and keenly observant.”

 
____________

The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1992

”Travel writing is a demanding genre. At its best, it is an exquisite mix of the personal, the philosophical and the factual — artfully propelled by vivid description. That's not an easy balance to achieve. But Emily Hiestand gets it just right.”

____________

Kirkpatrick Sale, author of The Conquest of Paradise
“If one must travel, one should do it with the eyes of a child, the mind of an ecologist, the heart of a pagan, and the words of a poet. Astonishingly, Emily Hiestand has all of that.”

____________

The Boston Globe
Review by Geoffrey Stokes

Altogether terrific — “Hiestand journeys in this altogether terrific book to the far reaches of the human heart as well as to places for which there are maps. Her language is special. It is also, in the best sense of the word, “poetic”: precise, intense, compacted, and full of surprises.” 

__________

The Atlantic, December1992
Review by Phoebe-Lou Adams

A truly good traveler — “Ms. Hiestand recounts her travels in Greece, Orkney, the Everglades, and Belize with perceptive attention to history, current social conditions, and ecology. She does not ignore the traditional pleasure of seeing strange landscapes, which she describes with exceptional skill, and unfamiliar wildlife. ‘The heron’s dance is a hypnotic, snake-necked swaying after prey, then a lunge: crayfish in pincer bill, it crunches down and swallows whole, the telltale lump in its throat… each step is a slow-motion marvel: three finger-like toes slowly retract, pulling up and together; the leg bends; step; the toes spread over a mat of leaves stealthily as thieves caressing jade plates.’ This elegant vignette was observed from aboard a boat grounded on an Everglades shoal out of radio range for distress signals, proving, that Ms. Hiestand is a truly good traveler — she enjoys the unexpected.”

____________

Franklin Burroughs, author of Billy Watson’s Croker Sack and other essays

Intelligence and humor — “Emily Hiestand encounters flora and fauna, myths and language, history and ecology as participants in an ancient, discontinuous colloquy. As she eavesdrops, she must reconstruct, by conjecture, wit, and erudition, the contexts and issues; must catch the nuances of allusion, affection, or insult. Her ability to do this is astonishing. Her range of references is wide and unexpected, and she is a wonderful observer. But what holds the book together is a wry and elegant dexterity of intelligence, a sense of humor that engages both the solemn revelations and the undignified exasperations of travel with precision and elan, and makes them cohere.”

____________

Robert Finch, essayist, editor, The Norton Book of Nature Writing

“The most exciting travel writing I have read in years.  — These pieces are, in the best sense, world-views... The poetic eye is their greatest strength; or rather, a poetic sensibility and intuitive perceptiveness combined with a remarkably cultivated and civilized intellect. She confronts head on some of the basic issues of writing and thinking about nature: the question of ‘ecological communion’ and what it means, both in a philosophical and practical everyday sense;  the connections between human and wild nature; the differences between ‘good’ and ‘natural;’ etc... So many nature writers, even good ones, shy away from examining the assumptions that underlie their work, or hide behind homilies like ‘healing,’ ‘sacredness of place,’ ‘holistic relationships,’ etc., implying that any attempt to give serious intellectual examination... to these and other central concepts was somehow heresy against the Earth, while at the same time refusing to admit the... implications of some of the ancient myths and world-view to which they are professing allegiance. It is the full engagement of the narrator with her material that immediately pulls the reader in. I love her fluid, rich, slightly baroque style. It seems to reflect her heritage, more in its expansive rhythms and slight formality of diction than in any phrases. The style seems to be an expression of good manners, good intellectual manners.” 

____________

Library Journal
Review by Jane Gilliland

“More than a collection of travel essays... With its natural synthesis of poetry and prose with nature and culture, this volume provides a literary treat for the mind.”  

____________

Patricia Hampl, author of A Romantic Education

“In these fresh accounts of far-flung locations, Hiestand keeps returning us to the profound questions of home. That is the book’s great discovery: we’re in this together, wherever we are.” 

____________

Beacon Press, 1992

A new level of travel writing — “There are travelers — clutching cameras and maps, timidly seeking the familiar — and then there are explorers, those who travel to challenge themselves, to learn. Emily Hiestand is one of the latter. She is also a rare find — a truly gifted prose writer. In The Very Rich Hours, Hiestand raises the art of travel writing to a new level. She has the eye of a poet and brings all her descriptive powers to bear in lush, visually stimulating passages on the people and places she visits. But it is Hiestand’s intellect that makes her stand out in the crowd of travel writers. Emily doesn’t travel as a means of passing time or even in hopes of seeing the exotic. She travels as a way of ‘testing premises’ about human nature. In her world, human history is as important as the natural history of the places she visits.”

____________

Bonnie Costello, author of Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions

Humanism quickened by science — “Emily Hiestand welcomes into her personal narrative the lessons of human and natural history alike. The prose quivers with grace and wit as it charges the large questions with luminous details. Here is humanism quickened by science, the present deepened by its connection with the past.”

____________

Sierra, July-August, 1993
Review by Kathleen Courrier

What is right habitation? — “Though she muses brilliantly on the joys of aimless travel, poet Emily Hiestand leaves such pursuits to others. Her trips to far-off places are taken ‘to pose a question – what is right habitation? — and to listen for such answers as each place has to give.’ Trailing Mayan ghosts in Belize, Hiestand asks whether ‘economic development means acquiring the ecological and psychological wounds of the West.’ Drifting through the Everglades, she slowly lets go of the idea that life revolves around human beings, then exults in the peace that shedding the notion brings. In Scotland's remote Orkney Islands, she tests the premise that ‘a people who cultivate civilities in public life also tend their lands and water with care.’ In Greece, Hiestand revisits the classics, speculating that the social upheavals dramatized in Greek tragedy may have begun with violations of nature (as in the Oresteia, for example, when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia, the female life force, to the demands of the warrior state, only to pay later with his own life).”