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Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss Hardcover – July 9, 2019
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Named a "Best Book of the Year" by New Statesman, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and Washington Independent Review of Books
Southern Book Prize Finalist
From New York Times contributing opinion writer Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family—and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.
Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father—and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver.
And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds—the natural one and our own—“the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.”
Gorgeously illustrated by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut.
- Print length248 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMilkweed Editions
- Publication dateJuly 9, 2019
- Dimensions5.8 x 1.1 x 8.6 inches
- ISBN-101571313788
- ISBN-13978-1571313782
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Beautifully written, masterfully structured, and brimming with insight into the natural world, Late Migrations can claim its place alongside Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and A Death in the Family. It has the makings of an American classic.”—Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth
"[Margaret Renkl] is the most beautiful writer! I love this book. It's about the South, and growing up there, and about her love of nature and animals and her wonderful family." —Reese Witherspoon
"A perfect book to read in the summer . . . This is the kind of writing that makes me want to just stay put, reread and savor everything about that moment." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
"Equal parts Annie Dillard and Anne Lamott with a healthy sprinkle of Tennessee dry rub thrown in." —New York Times Book Review
"A beautiful accretion of poetic prose musings"—Oprah Daily
“A compact glory, crosscutting between consummate family memoir and keenly observed backyard natural history. Renkl’s deft juxtapositions close up the gap between humans and nonhumans and revive our lost kinship with other living things.”—Richard Powers, author of The Overstory
"Magnificent . . . Conjure your favorite place in the natural world: beach, mountain, lake, forest, porch, windowsill rooftop? Precisely there is the best place in which to savor this book." —NPR.org
"Late Migrations has echoes of Annie Dillard's The Writing Life—with grandparents, sons, dogs and birds sharing the spotlight, it's a witty, warm and unaccountably soothing all-American story." —People
"[Renkl] guides us through a South lush with bluebirds, pecan orchards, and glasses of whiskey shared at dusk in this collection of prose in poetry-size bits; as it celebrates bounty, it also mourns the profound losses we face every day." —O, the Oprah Magazine
"Graceful . . . like a belated answer to [E.B.] White." —Wall Street Journal
"A lovely collection of essays about life, nature, and family. It will make you laugh, cry—and breathe more deeply." —Parade Magazine
“This warm, rich memoir might be the sleeper of the summer. [Renkl] grew up in the South, nursed her aging parents, and never once lost her love for life, light, and the natural world. Beautiful is the word, beautiful all the way through.”—Philadelphia Inquirer
"Like the spirituality of Krista Tippett's On Being meets the brevity of Joe Brainard . . . The miniature essays in Late Migrations approach with modesty, deliver bittersweet epiphanies, and feel like small doses of religion."—Literary Hub
"In her poignant debut, a memoir, Renkl weaves together observations from her current home in Nashville and short vignettes of nature and growing up in the South.—Garden & Gun
“Renkl feels the lives and struggles of each creature that enters her yard as keenly as she feels the paths followed by her mother, grandmother, her people. Learning to accept the sometimes harsh, always lush natural world may crack open a window to acceptance of our own losses. In Late Migrations, we welcome new life, mourn its passing, and honor it along the way.”—Indie Next List (July 2019), selected by Kat Baird, The Book Bin
"[A] stunning collection of essays merging the natural landscapes of Alabama and Tennessee with generations of family history, grief and renewal. Renkl's voice sounds very close to the reader's ear: intimate, confiding, candid and alert." —Shelf Awareness
"A book that will be treasured."—Minneapolis Star Tribune
"One of the best books I've read in a long time . . . [and] one of the most beautiful essay collections that I have ever read. It will give you chills."—Silas House, author of Southernmost
“A close and vigilant witness to loss and gain, Renkl wrenches meaning from the intimate moments that define us. Her work is a chronicle of being. And a challenge to cynicism. Late Migrations is flat-out brilliant and it has arrived right on time.”—John T. Edge, author of The Potlikker Papers
“Gracefully written and closely observed, Renkl’s lovely essays are tinged with the longing for family and places now gone while rejoicing in the flutter of birds and life still alive.”—Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dreams
“Here is an extraordinary mind combined with a poet’s soul to register our own old world in a way we have not quite seen before. Late Migrations is the psychological and spiritual portrait of an entire family and place presented in quick takes—snapshots—a soul’s true memoir. The dire dreams and fears of childhood, the mother’s mysterious tears, the imperfect beloved family . . . all are part of a charged and vibrant natural world also filled with rivalry, conflict, the occasional resolution, loss, and delight. Late Migrations is a continual revelation.”—Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls
“Renkl holds my attention with essays about plants and caterpillars in a way no other nature writer can.”—Mary Laura Philpott, author of I Miss You When I Blink
“This is the story of grief accelerated by beauty and beauty made richer by grief. . . . Like Patti Smith in Woolgathering, Renkl aligns natural history with personal history so completely that the one becomes the other. Like Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Renkl makes, of a ring of suburbia, an alchemical exotica.”—The Rumpus
“[A] magnificent debut . . . Renkl instructs that even amid life’s most devastating moments, there are reasons for hope and celebration. Readers will savor each page and the many gems of wisdom they contain.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Compelling, rich, satisfying . . . The short, potent essays of Late Migrations are objects as worthy of marvel and study as the birds and other creatures they observe.”—Foreword Reviews (starred review)
“A melding of flora, fauna and family . . . Renkl captures the spirit and contemporary culture of the American South better than anyone.”—Book Page, A 2019 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book
“[Late Migrations] is shot through with deep wonder and a profound sense of loss. It is a fine feat, this book. Renkl intimately knows that ‘this life thrives on death’ and chooses to sing the glory of being alive all the same.”—Booklist
“A series of redolent snapshots and memories that seem to halt time. . . . [Renkl’s] narrative metaphor becomes the miraculous order of nature . . . in all its glory and cruelty; she vividly captures ‘the splendor of decay.’”—Kirkus
“A captivating, beautifully written story of growing up, love, loss, living, and a close extended family by a talented nature writer and memoirist that will appeal to those who enjoy introspective memoirs and the natural world close to home.”—Library Journal
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
AUBURN, 1982
I went to a land-grant university, a rural school that students at the rival institution dismissed as a cow college, though I was a junior before I ever saw a single cow there. For someone who had spent her childhood almost entirely outdoors, my college life was unacceptably enclosed. Every day I followed the same brick path from crowded dorm to crowded class to crowded office to rowded cafeteria, and then back to the dorm again. A gentler terrain of fields and ponds and piney woods existed less than a mile from the liberal arts high-rise, but I had no time for idle exploring, for poking about in the scaled-down universe where forestry and agriculture students learned their trade.
One afternoon late in the fall of my junior year, I broke. I had stopped at the cafeteria to grab a sandwich before the dinner crowd hit, hoping for a few minutes of quiet in which to read my literature assignment, the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, before my evening shift at the dorm desk. But even with few students present, there was nothing resembling quiet in that cavernous room. The loudspeaker blasted John Cougar’s ditty about Jack and Diane, and I pressed my fingers into my ears and hunched low over my book. The sound of my own urgent blood thumping through my veins quarreled with the magnificent sprung rhythm of the poem as thoroughly as Jack and Diane did, and I finally snapped the book closed. My heart was still pounding as I stepped into the dorm lobby, ditched my pack, and started walking. I was headed out.
It was a delight to be moving, to feel my body expanding into the larger gestures of the outdoors. What a relief to feel my walk lengthening into a stride and my lungs taking in air by the gulp. I kept walking―past the football stadium, past the sororities―until I came to the red dirt lanes of the agriculture program’s experimental fields. Brindled cows turned their unsurprised faces toward me in pastures dotted with hay bales that looked like giant spools of golden thread. The empty bluebird boxes nailed to the fence posts were shining in the slanted light. A red-tailed hawk―the only kind I could name―glided past, calling into the sky.
I caught my breath and walked on, with a rising sense that glory was all around me. Only at twilight can an ordinary mortal walk in light and dark at once―feet plodding through night, eyes turned up toward bright day. It is a glimpse into eternity, that bewildering notion of endless time, where light and dark exist simultaneously.
When the fields gave way to the experimental forest, the wind had picked up, and dogwood leaves were lifting and falling in the light. There are few sights lovelier than leaves being carried on wind. Though that sight was surely common on the campus quad, I had somehow failed to register it. And the swifts wheeling in the sky as evening came on―they would be visible to anyone standing on the sidewalk outside Haley Center, yet I had missed them, too.
There, in that forest, I heard the sound of trees giving themselves over to night. Long after I turned in my paper on Hopkins, long after I was gone myself, this goldengrove unleaving would be releasing its bounty to the wind.
***
BABEL
PHILADELPHIA, 1984
I thought I had escaped the beautiful, benighted South for good when I left Alabama for graduate school in Philadelphia in 1984, though now I can’t imagine how this delusion ever took root. At the age of twenty-two, I had never set foot any farther north than Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the time I got to Philadelphia, I was so poorly traveled―and so geographically illiterate―I could not pick out the state of Pennsylvania on an unlabeled weather map on the evening news.
I can’t even say why I thought I should get a doctorate in English. The questions that occupy scholars―details of textuality, previously unnoted formative influences, nuances of historical context―held no interest for me. Why hadn’t I applied to writing programs instead? Some vague idea about employability, maybe.
When I tell people, if it ever comes up, that I once spent a semester in Philadelphia, a knot instantly forms in the back of my throat, a reminder across thirty years of the panic and despair I felt with every step I took on those grimy sidewalks, with every breath of that heavy, exhaust-burdened air. I had moved into a walkup on a main artery of West Philly, and I lay awake that first sweltering night with the windows open to catch what passed for a breeze, waiting for the sounds of traffic to die down. They never did. All night long, the gears of delivery trucks ground at the traffic light on the corner; four floors down, strangers muttered and swore in the darkness.
Everywhere in the City of Brotherly Love were metaphors for my own dislocation: a homeless woman squatting in the grocery store parking lot, indifferent to the puddle spreading below her; the sparrows and pigeons, all sepia and brown, that replaced the scolding blue jays and scarlet cardinals I’d left behind; even deep snow, which all my life I had longed to see, was flecked with soot when it finally arrived. I was so homesick for the natural world that I tamed a mouse who lived in my wall, carefully placing stale Cheetos on the floor beyond me, just to feel the creature’s delicate feet skittering across my own bare toes.
If I was misplaced in the city, sick with longing for the hidebound landscape I had just stomped away from, shaking its caked red dirt from my sandals, oh, how much more disrupted I felt in my actual classes. The dead languages I was studying―Old English and Latin―were more relevant to my notions of literature than anything I heard in the literary theory course. The aim of the course, at least so far as I could discern it, was to liberate literature from both authorial intent and any claim of independent meaning achieved by close reading. “The text can’t mean anything independent of the reader,” the professor, a luminary of the field, announced. “Even the word ‘mean’ doesn’t mean anything.”
To a person who has wanted since the age of fourteen to be a poet, a classroom in which all the words of the English language have been made bereft of the power to create meaning, or at least a meaning that can be reliably communicated to others, is not a natural home. I was young, both fearful and arrogant, and perhaps I had been praised too often for an inclination to argue on behalf of a cause.
“The word ‘mean’ doesn’t mean anything”―these were fighting words to me. I raised my hand. “Pretend we’re in the library, and you’re standing on a ladder above me, eye-level with a shelf that holds King Lear and Jane Fonda’s Workout Book,” I said, red-faced and stammering, sounding far less assured than I felt. “If I say, ‘Hand me down that tragedy,’ which book do you reach for?”
The other students in the class, young scholars already versed in the fundamental ideas behind post-structuralist literary theories, must have thought they were listening to Elly May Clampett. They laughed out loud. I never raised my hand again.
Once, not long after I arrived in Philadelphia, a thundering car crash splintered the relative calm of a Sunday afternoon outside my apartment, and the building emptied itself onto the sidewalk as everyone came out to see what happened. I’m not speaking in metaphors when I say that my neighbors were surely as lost as I was: mostly immigrants from somewhere much farther away than Alabama, they couldn’t communicate with each other or with me―not because we couldn’t agree on the meaning of the words, but because none of the words we knew belonged to the same language.
***
THANKSGIVING
PHILADELPHIA, 1984
Winter break came so early in December that it made no sense to go home for Thanksgiving, no matter how homesick I was. But as the dark nights grew longer and the cold winds blew colder, I wavered. Was it too late? Could I still change my mind?
It was too late. Of course. It was far, far too late. And I had papers to write. I had papers to grade. Also, I had no car, and forget booking a plane ticket so close to the holiday, even if I’d had money to spare for a plane ticket, which on a graduate student’s stipend I definitely did not. Amtrak was sold out, and the long, long bus ride seemed too daunting. I would be spending Thanksgiving in Philadelphia, a thousand miles from home.
“I don’t think I can stand it here,” I said during the weekly call to my parents that Sunday. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Just come home,” my father said.
“It’s too late.” I was crying by then. “It’s way too late.”
“You can always come home, Sweet,” he said. “Even if you marry a bastard, you can always leave him and come on home.”
My father intended no irony in making this point. He had never read Thomas Wolfe―might never have heard of Thomas Wolfe. These were words of loving reassurance from a parent to his child, a reminder that as long as he and my mother were alive, there would always be a place in the world for me, a place where I would always belong, even if I didn’t always believe I belonged there.
But I wonder now, decades later, if my father’s words were more than a reminder of my everlasting place in the family. I wonder now if they were also an expression of his own longing for the days when all his chicks were still in the nest, when the circle was still closed and the family that he and my mother had made was complete. I was the first child to leave home, but I had given no thought to my parents’ own loneliness as they pulled away from the curb in front of my apartment in Philadelphia, an empty U-Haul rattling behind Dad’s ancient panel van, for the long drive back to Alabama without me.
I gave no thought to it then, but I think of it all the time now. I think of my father’s words across a bad landline connection in 1984 that reached my homesick heart in cold Philadelphia. I think of the twenty-six-hour bus ride into the heart of Greyhound darkness that followed, a desperate journey that got me home in time for the squash casserole and the cranberry relish. I think most of my own happiness, of all the years with a good man and the family we have made together and the absorbing work―everything that followed a single season of loss, and only because I listened to my father. Because I came home.
Product details
- Publisher : Milkweed Editions; First Edition (July 9, 2019)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 248 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1571313788
- ISBN-13 : 978-1571313782
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.8 x 1.1 x 8.6 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #49,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #46 in Nature Writing & Essays
- #165 in Grief & Bereavement
- #1,830 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Margaret Renkl is the author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (2019) and Graceland, At Last: Notes On Hope and Heartache from the American South. Her new book, The Comfort of Crows, A Backyard Year, will be published in October 2023. She is also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear each Monday. A graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she lives in Nashville. Learn more at margaretrenkl.com.
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The title "Late Migrations' refers, hopefully, to the pattern of wildlife that faithfully returns each season to enrich our lives, and do all the hard work that needs doing to keep our complex ecosystem functioning, and robust, for generations.
The author wrote the book in her late fifties, and her work is blooming, becoming a classic much as Georgia O'Keefe's paintings of nature created her most moving work, late in her life. p.229
In her brief, poetic essays Ms. Renkl weaves nature and family together in a pattern that defies science, but is perfectly comprehensible when readers look at life as a beautiful, interconnected tapestry. In an interview she specifically states that " The nature essays are family essays." p. 237
A lot of people in the North, East and West of these United States shrug their shoulders at the idea that literature, poetry, music and civil behavior actually thrive in the Deep South. There is a suspicion that it's a politically backwards area. The author, however, resides in Nashville, the heart of Great Music, and is a weekly contributor to the New York Times.
In a world that, to some, appear lost in a movement that no longer honors deep family traditions and ties, Margaret Renkl and writes powerfully and personally about the joys and griefs that accompany raising children, taking care of elderly parents, and making what used to be called "a home."
She writes well, truly well, but the most endearing in her poetic prose is the many quotes she shares, from memory, and from conversations transcribed from tapes she and her brother, Billy Renkl, made with their extended family over several generations.
In one essay titled " Every time We Say Goodbye" sung by Ella Fitzgerald, she describes her parents dancing deep in rural Alabama: " My mother is barefoot. My father is wearing his work shoes, but my mother's toes are in no danger. These steps are as familiar to them as their own heartbeats." p.72
In "All Birds" she painfully teaches her little boy that, "Yes, all birds die?" And, as is always the case with the little people we call our children: "All mommies die?" And, finally: "I will die?" he said, his voice quavering. "I will be dead?" p. 140-1
More than half of the 200 pages long collection of essays spanning the years 1931-2018 are rooted in the observations and reflections she has nurtured while working in her home office in Nashville, Tennessee through her windows into her half acre backyard. One of the last essays carries the book's title "Late Migrations." She writes about the increasing absence of the beautiful Monarch butterfly; few of us may know that "it takes the monarch four generations, sometimes five, to make the full round-trip from Mexico to their northern breeding grounds and back." Some us may know that there used to be a plentiful one billion monarch butterflies in North America. Now there are only ninety-three million.'
Margaret Renkl has a deep sense that something is in the process of going terribly wrong, because butterflies and bees are disappearing. She wonders what we are doing with our pesticides; so she plants "clover" in her suburban garden in Nashville, Tennessee, hoping the honey bees will find her home, and her backyard.
In Prairie Lights she echoes the Danish Story Teller, Hans Christian Andersen, when she quotes a little boy to come out of the car to watch the stars: "I am too little, " he said. "It's too big, and I am too little." p.93
Margaret Renkle's essays, illustrated by her brother, Billy Renkl, would make an excellent, safe family and small group go-to 'shared-talk' book. Somehow we have come to a place where we may need to talk about how to keep our families and our nature safe-for generations to come.
Renkl explores both the world outside her home, filled with rat snakes, bees, and her beloved birds, and ties it into the loss of her own parents. She ties all this together, stating the obvious in new ways that connect life and death in a natural context, but not diminishing the impact. “The shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is love’s own twin” (7).
Her description of the natural world is centered around her own backyard in Tennessee, something that most of us can relate to easier than the wilderness explorer. In the chapter, “Late Migration,” Renkl tells us about her desire to attract monarch butterflies. She notes there were once over a billion monarch butterflies in North America, and now there are less than 100 million. “Once upon a time, even a loss of that magnitude might have caused me only a flicker of concern, the kind of thing I trusted scientists to straighten out. But I am old enough now to have buried many of my loved ones, and loss is too often something I can do nothing about.”
Since she can do something about this problem, she plants a garden to attract monarch butterflies. Although they do not come at first, a later migrating group comes at the end of summer. She notes that monarchs migrate like birds, but it takes four to five generations of butterflies to make it. No single butterfly makes the entire migration. The natural world follows its own path.
Her love of the natural world around her reminds her of the fragility of life and the cruelty of the world. But knowing that death is part of a natural cycle does not make it easier to address. In “After the Fall,” a single powerful page addressing grief and offering hope, Renkl writes about grief:
“This talk of making peace with it. Of feeling it and then finding a way through. Of closure. It’s all nonsense.
Here is what no one told me about grief: you inhabit it like a skin. Everywhere you go, you wear grief under your clothes. Everything you see, you see through it, like a film.”
Grief changes people. But change is not always bad and with time those changes create a different person who can still live.
“What I mean is, time offers your old self a new shape. What I mean is, you are the old, ungrieving you, and you are also the new ruined you. You are both, and you will always be both. There is nothing to fear. There is nothing at all to fear. Walkout into the springtime, and look: the birds welcome you with a chorus. The flowers turn their faces to your face. The last of last year’s leaves, still damp in the shadows, smell ripe and faintly of fall” (281).
Part of that new person is the memories that we carry with us. Memories become unreliable for accuracy as we move on. “All these images are absolutely clear, but I know better than to trust them. I have turned them over so often the edges have become soft and worn, their contours wholly unreliable” (98). While our memories do change, I only see them as becoming unreliable in their factual accuracy. We begin to alter those memories so they become true to our experiences more than the facts. Truth is not always found in the facts.
Renkl’s short essays reflect a range of writing styles. From natural descriptions to what can best be described as prose poetry (e.g. “Redbird, Sundown), making this a fascinating read. She even includes an essay called “The Imperfect-Family Beatitudes” that offers a humorous look at families and ends with an exhortation to tell your children you love them every time you leave them.
Renkl is an outstanding writer who has published in a number of publications, especially the New York Times, but this is her first book. After the success of this book, we can hope to see more come from her. It is a rare voice that can address grief and yet offer hope.
“Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being. In the fairy tale, we tell ourselves, darkness holds nothing resembling a gift.
What we feel always contains its own truth, but it is not the only truth, and darkness almost always harbors some bit of goodness tucked out of sight, waiting for an unexpected light to shine, to reveal it in its deepest hiding place” (186).
Renkl excels at finding that unexpected light in the darkness. As a result, she has added an indispensable volume to the library of grief, loss, and love.
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