How the West Was Logged
W.S. Merwin understood the fragility of forests. The poet, who died in March, lived on a conservancy on Maui that he and his wife, Paula, had founded decades earlier. There, they were surrounded by palm trees that the couple had planted as seedlings on what had been depleted land.
“I want to tell what the forests / were like,” Merwin wrote in his poem “Witness.” “I will have to speak / in a foreign language.”
Karl Marlantes strives to speak in that language in his new novel, Deep River.
A grand work that spans decades, beginning in the late 19th century and continuing into World War I and the Great Depression and beyond, the book tells of (2010), was a bestseller inspired by his experiences as a Marine during the Vietnam War. For , the author looks further back, to his childhood: raised in a logging town in Oregon and having worked in commercial fishing in his teens, Marlantes taps his knowledge of the region to create a convincingly detailed portrait of it and its relationship to people who once lived off the land.
