Going to Ground: Simple Life on a Georgia Pond

by Amy Blackmarr

Book Overview

Warmth, charm, and humor color a city woman's Thoreauvian essays upon returning to her roots in the pine woods of rural Georgia. Going to Ground is a meditative embrace of nature and spirit, in the tradition of Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, that gracefully captures the millennial Zeitgeist.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670875678
• ISBN13: 9780670875672
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 170 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Nice place to sit back and relax

Young South Georgia woman gets off the fast train, returns to family's shack by the pond, then delivers us a way to enjoy her experiences and reflections. The sparce prose of Amy Blackmarr lets you sit back and relax awhile. You'll also enjoy the sequel, House of Steps, where she moves to a peculiar little house out in Kansas. Her outlook on life is quite refreshing. Both books are short, too, so they're great for summer trips to the beach, or weekends out in the backyard.

Wow - What a writer!

I was very pleased with this book - Amy Blackmarr's style really impressed me. Each chapter is a short story of it's own, yet they are all about her life & experiences with the same place. I enjoyed every chapter, every story - There was even one which I loved so much, found it so profound, that I immediately reread it & then later read it outloud to my husband.Great work, Amy! Thank you! I can't wait to read your other works.

Provocative and deeply spiritual

Kudos to Amy Blackmarr for a gently ironic, sometimes funny, touching and always honest look at the questions about life, death, and living that we all grapple with every day. She turns the ordinary experiences of her life at her grandfather's Georgia cabin into delightful, searching stories that I find new surprises and new meaning in every time I read them. Full of sensual details and images that take me right to where she is, standing on the back steps of a tarpaper shack, sipping coffee, looking out over a pond, or striking through the swamps watching for snakes and alligators! A great, fast read.

A fine book of the shackdwelling-writer genre.

Ever since Thoreau, it seems that writers have been regularly going to the woods to inhabit shacks, and then write on their experiences there. Amy Blackmarr has produced a fine book of this sort, bittersweet, somewhat melancholy, and full of interesting observations on life and nature written as a series of chapter-essays. Strangely enough, in an interview in Atlanta she claims she was not particularly familar with Thoreau until after she moved to the cabin, though her reasoning for doing it seem to come straight from that source. Like a Zen master living in the temple ruins, she likewise inhabits her grandfathers shack, accepting it pretty well as it is, and resists the temptation to go into relating feats of construction and carpentry, a refreshing change for books of this nature. In the end the shack is sold, and she moves on, apparently now to a treehouse, and if this book is any example, I'm sure her exploits there,should she care to write about them , should be equally well received.

"Going to Ground" is a book of sincerity and connection

Readers do not have to live in the south to appreciate the sincerity of the voice of Amy Blackmarr in her first collection of essays entitled "Going to Ground: Simple Life on a Georgia Pond." Blackmarr takes her experiences while living in her Grandfather's tar-papered, unheated fishing cabin located in the woods of south Georgia and shows the reader how nature, including human nature, can change one's life forever. Though Blackmarr's pond is not Walden, she does find answers to some of her questions about life and death (her grandmother's and her dog's) during her five-year stay. She realizes that only true friends are willing to take a long drive into the country to visit in a cabin that has no hot water or heat. Often alone, she finds solace as well as wisdom in the company of Gene, her neighbor who farms the land, and Queenie and Max, her dogs. "Going to Ground" is both humorous and thought-provoking. But perhaps the largest compliment for Blackmarr is her ability to relate to her reader, to make the reader say, "I understand; I've been there, too."