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Editor’s Note: Maine Bound is a column featuring new books written by Maine authors, set in the Pine Tree State or that have other local ties.
DOWN THE SHORE: The Faces of Maine’s Coastal Fisheries, text by Michael Crowley and photos by Nancy Trueworthy, Down East Books, Camden, 2003, hardcover, 96 pages, 123 color photographs, $30.
Combine Nancy Trueworthy’s fine photography with journalist Michael Crowley’s succinct descriptions of commercial fishing and you get a coffee-table classic capturing the essence of Maine’s coastal fisheries.
Trueworthy, a Portland-based photographer, has worked for more than three decades covering a range of assignments. For 13 years, she followed Maine fishermen in their pursuit of species from lobsters to baby eels. Her photographs are sharp and the color images convey the tradition and difficulty of commercial fishing.
A Belfast resident, Crowley has worked as a commercial fisherman, longshoreman, boat builder and writer and editor for National Fisherman for more than 20 years. He brightens the book with tight descriptive writing of the various methods and lifestyle of those fishing Maine’s inshore waters.
The book’s title, “Down the Shore,” comes from that fine Maine expression used by fishermen and their families when they head off to work.
Trueworthy and Crowley provide individual portraits of fishermen going after herring, menhaden, sea urchins, bloodworms, sandworms, lobster, elvers, shrimp, softshell clams, crabs, alewives and scallops. The subjects range from lobster fishermen on the Portland docks to elver fishermen tending their fyke nets on the Upper Medomack River in Waldoboro.
Elvers, baby eels born in the Sargasso Sea off Bermuda that ride ocean currents to the coastal rivers of Maine, are captured in springtime by hearty bands of fishermen who spend their nights rushing from river to river to empty their nets before the tide ebbs.
As Trueworthy shows in a moving montage of photos and Crowley explains, elver fishermen are a hard-working, territorial bunch. They also are not above engaging in a degree of
lawlessness to protect their nets from unscrupulous raiders.
“In Stonington, for example,” Crowley writes, “there was ‘Shotgun Annie’ who would fire over the heads of the other elver fishermen to protect her spot on the bank.”
Along with fishermen at work, Trueworthy also depicts Maine women who derive their living from fishing. One set of photos shows a female crew at Day’s in Yarmouth picking meat from freshly caught softshell crabs.
In their closing chapter, “Faces of the Coast,” Trueworthy and Crowley show individuals and families who tell them about old maritime superstitions such as “don’t mess with the seabirds,” “never take ham sandwiches on a boat,” “never stand on the dock and watch a boat go out of sight,” and “watch out for old boats and new captains.” – Walter Griffin
THE LIP OF AWARENESS, by Leon Raikes; Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Ky., 2004; 28 pages.
A great sense of sincerity fills Husson professor Leon Raikes’ new chapbook, “The Lip of Awareness.” The 19 poems of the nicely made little volume strive to bring the hidden world of shamans, buddhas, kachinas and Muslim mystics into focus, on the assumption that the unseen is constantly in plain sight.
In the landscape of Raikes’ poems, the invisible world is quite noticeable if only we’ll look for it. He insists that we view the acts and forms of nature as the keys to seeing into the real life of things:
If the rain
some April evening
drifts into an unknown riff
ask yourself
about this new wash of colors
over dark stones.
The entreaty that we look through fresh eyes echoes throughout the book, as in “Red Roadside Flowers,” in which summer blossoms recalled in autumn are invented “all over again” and become “a conjugation in some new color / of the same green verb.” This is one of Raikes’ expressions of how the usual world, when viewed with curiosity, reveals the unusual world.
These poems are efforts not just to reinvent the routine world for the novelty, but to awaken to what underlies it. “Indigenous Buddha” remarks on the stillness that can be noticed everywhere, in everything, from the Far East to, presumably, Maine where rivers, pumpkins and a dead catfish reveal the same quality of stillness as “the artifacts of the East.”
Raikes speaks with some authority on the feel of distant lands, as before moving to Steuben in 1998 to take up his post in Husson’s English department, he lived in Lebanon, where he received a master’s degree from the American University of Beirut. He earned a doctorate from Michigan State University and taught at Hope College in Michigan. He has lived in Montana and grew up in Salt Lake City. His poems have appeared previously in literary journals such as Oberon and Atlanta Review.
In their ingenuous curiosity, the poems in “The Lip of Awareness” have a strange lack of irony. While many of the sharpest lines occur in three poems on departed relatives (“My Mother’s Spoon” begins: “On my worst days / I use it as she did: to stir / the sweet milk into my coffee”), most of the poems are engaged simply with trying to bring the world into focus rather than confronting its paradoxes. The feeling of sincere seeking makes them worth noticing, and a larger selection in the future may help clarify the poet’s developing themes and wrestling with language’s limitations. – Dana Wilde
GOOFY FOOT by David Daniel; Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, N.Y., 2003; 292 pages, hardcover, $23.95.
David Daniel and Stephen King must have exchanged inspiration when they were classmates at the University of Maine years ago, because Daniel’s latest detective novel, “Goofy Foot,” has the same page-turning momentum and literate care for setting and characters as King’s horror stories.
Daniel’s seventh book is set on the South Shore of his native Massachusetts. Private eye Alex Rasmussen is hired by a nervous, divorced mother to find her teenage daughter who went off to visit her father but, as the story opens, has not called home for several days.
At first Rasmussen believes, as do the local police, that the girl will turn up. But being conscientious to a fault, he pokes around the little beach town and begins turning up apparently unrelated but peculiar bits of information, and people. A legendary surfer whose business mysteriously burned years earlier. A well-connected community leader who likes midnight swims and once knew the missing girl’s father. Local stories about a drowned young woman and a missing hitchhiker. A plan for an Indian casino on an abandoned point of land. And the girl and her father remain missing.
The facts converge only slowly, and by midway through the book we still have only tidbits. And yet, in the tough-guy tradition of Raymond Chandler and James Cain, Rasmussen’s infectious curiosity and his wry, blinking-innocent humor, like pepper in the writing, drive the story forward insistently. The descriptions of the sleepy New England beach town and the electric impurities of Lowell, Mass., Rasmussen’s home base, are exceptionally vivid. This book is a great read, with sharply drawn characters and a narrative flow that pulls like a magnet.
David Daniel is currently the Jack Kerouac Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, and has occasionally made excursions back to Orono for readings. His sixth novel, “White Rabbit,” was also published in 2003. – Dana Wilde
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