New Ground

by Nancy Dillingham

Book Overview

Strongly evocative of time and place and unified by voice and theme'there is a strong sense of ironythroughout?Nancy Dillingham's poems and proseresonate with the poignancy of a warm Southern day. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566641349
• ISBN13: 9781566641340
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: WorldComm
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Important new voice in American literature

A powerful new voice in American literature makes itself heard in New Ground, a collection of short stories and poetry by Nancy Dillingham. Her poems, mostly concerned with relationships and sexuality, are clever contemporary studies in wordplay, while the short stories live in an isolated time and place of their own-not contemporary, but always fresh, sometimes fierce and often surprising. The book opens with "Providence," wherein an old woman tells a reporter how she, as a child, was given to the boss man at the Big House so her family could keep their land. Dillingham tells this and her other stories with lyrical matter-of-factness, without sympathy or accusation. Where Flannery O'Connor used physical deformities to illustrate the flawed nature of her characters, Dillingham is more apt to sketch metaphysical deformities-men who are spiritually mute, women who are despondent with disappointment, and children who become adults at much too early of an age. Contrasted with these are her stories of ageless innocence, where violence could happen but, by grace or by chance, doesn't. Fred Chappell, poet laureate of North Carolina and author of Brighten the Corner You Are In and other modern classics, calls New Ground "an odd and utterly genuine book," and had this to say in his foreword: "For all her severity of outlook, Nancy Dillingham is not a dour or gloomy writer. Things are as they are in her world and this very condition of their being is what caused her to write of them. She could have fashioned them to a more contemporary taste; she could have falsified, though I have the impression this possibility never even occurred to her. Instead, she has chosen to follow her own light and report what her vision discovers."

An unusual book that can stir our sentient feelings

Nancy Dillingham's first publication, New Ground, is an amazing collection of her short stories and poems. Her ability ot observe people, things and events, and her talent for finding words to tell us about them is what makes this book so interesting. Reading these stories is somewhat like looking at a gallery of fine paintings, or photographs. Each story has it's own character, and her detailed descriptions are so rich they need to be reread to fully grasp the picture she is presenting for us. One cannot be sure whether these stories are of true events, or of something Nancy has imagined, but she makes us think they could be true. Reading this collection is like looking through a family photograph album. The reader feels as if he is somehow intruding on the privacy of the folk involved. Nancy also gives us a touch of her poetry. I think she is first a poet, then a prose writer. Her poetry comes all through her prose. This is not a book that is to be read at one sitting, but to be read, and savored, and read again. The things she has left un- written in her stories are as important at the things she has written. This leaves us with the need to use our own imagination. I have enjoyed reading this book , and I recommed it to anyone who can find a few minutes to relax and let his mind wander into something new.