Temple: From a Writer's Notebook

A collection of interviews with the townspeople of Temple, Maine, is interspersed with the author's personal observations and journal writings

After Dennison ( The Lives of Children ) died from cancer in 1987, poet and translator Gardner and author and editor Stoehr, friends of Dennison, compiled this collection of his journal entries and neighbor profiles. The book is a celebration of small-town life in Temple, Maine, though most interesting here is the author's ambivalence in struggling with his relocation from New York City and his longing for his lost political and artistic life. Dennison was a writer of considerable power, with a clear eye for character and an intensity that reveals itself in staccato description and unself-conscious voice. It is unfortunate, however, that he died before he could shape these excerpts more narratively, for the descriptions and profiles as presented become repetitive.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Dennison (Luisa Domic, 1985, etc.) died in 1987, and this genial hodgepodge draws from his journals and his scattered notes on and interviews with people in Temple, Me., the rural community to which he migrated from New York City. Apparently, Dennison intended to organize these into some sort of communal portrait, and the raw material for a powerful book certainly exists. His writing and observations are sharp, and it is interesting to see the source for the rural New England settings in his novel Luisa Domic and the novella ``Shawno'' (to be reissued in one volume by Steerforth in June), but the lack of narrative drive drags the book down, particularly the sections culled from Dennison's journals. These contain mostly observations of nature, occasionally mixed with stories about his children and wife and, in a few places, his frustration with rural life. These passages, while lyrical, are much less involving than the interviews. These are the authentic voices of New England, men who sound detached even when discussing chain-saw accidents: ``He was workin' by himself one Saturday up the side of Spruce Mountain, 'bout four miles from the tarred road, and he slipped, or God knows what, 'n he cut his whole foot and ankle right off, right clean through the bone, the whole goddam way.'' They are also brutally honest: Of a local resident who had hung himself recently, one man burns, ``If I'd known he was goin' to do it I'd've helped him.... The man was a crook. He cheated me and he cheated everybody.'' To his credit, Dennison himself never paints too rosy a picture of rural life either--the slaughtering of a sheep is described explicitly. A potluck with some good bits, but it is clear that the author would have made something greater than simply the sum of its parts. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

What Dennison intended to be a comic epic about the little Maine community to which he repaired after 20 years' unsatisfying existence as an urban bohemian is a sad book but only in that it's a fragment on account of his 1987 death. It's made up of extracts from Dennison's journals as well as his interviews with old male neighbors, some of the last of generations of rural New England men who had to know all kinds of things about farming and mechanics in order to live in any comfort at all--once fairly commonplace knowledge that now seems almost magical because of its particularity to certain persons. Besides their knowledge, Dennison saw deep virtues and the attractions of their sometimes craggy personalities. His profiles of these men--counterpointed by the observations of nature, his own small children, younger neighbors, and his dogs and sparked by occasional flares of social and literary criticism--are real literature that reward reading, rereading, and pondering. (Two of Dennison's too few books of fiction have been reissued by Steerforth in one volume--Luisa Domic and Shawno, paper, $12 [1-883642-49-3]--in tandem with Temple.) Ray Olson