In The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence, David Axelrod
recalls a balmy night in May 1970 when he vowed to allow no one and
nothing he loves to pass from this life without praise, even if it
meant praising the most bewildering losses. In each of these
fourteen essays Axelrod delivers on that vow as he ranges across
topics as diverse as marriage, Japanese poetry, Craftsman design,
Old English riddles, racism, extinction, fatherhood,
mountaineering, predatory mega-fauna, street fighting, trains, the
Great Depression, and the effects of climate change-accretions of
absence that haunt the writer and will likewise haunt readers. The
essays in this collection grew from a ten-year period when the
author found himself periodically living and working abroad,
wondering why foreign landscapes haunted him more than the familiar
landscapes of the inland Pacific Northwest he called home. Each
place had a long history of habitation, but at home he was blind,
unable to see past the surfaces of things. Axelrod examines many
aspects of that phenomenon in these pages, framing surface
realities and imagining the scale and scope of that surface, but
also trying to sense what is absent or changed, and how, despite
its absence, the unseen accretes to ever-greater densities and
persists as something uncanny. Curious, alert, and keenly
observant, these essays probe the boundaries between what is here
and what is gone, what is present and what is past, in elegant
prose. Readers familiar with Axelrod's poetry will find a new facet
of his lyrical gifts, while those encountering his work for the
first time will be richly rewarded by the discovery of this
Northwest literary talent.
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