The Abundance
ANNIE DILLARD

A Poet, novelist and essayist, Annie Dillard is rightly famed in the United States for her heightened sensitivity to the wonders of the natural world expressed in prose of at times hallucinogenic intensity, and is long overdue for discovery here. This fabulous anthology of extracts from her writings over the past 40 years leaves the reader gasping for more.

Following a near fatal episode of pneumonia in her early twenties, Dillard spent a couple of years “making myself scarce, exploring the neighbourhood”, walking and camping in the valley near her home in Virginia. She condensed  her journal of that time – running to almost 20 volumes – into the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. From her favoured spot sitting on a sycamore log she watches water turtles “smooth as beans, gliding down the current in a series of weightless push-offs as when men bound on the moon” and follows a flight of swallows that “catch at my heart and trail it after them like streamers”.