Annie Dillard, The Abundance *** 1/2

The Abundance is a collection of pieces from Dillard's non-fiction works, covering the breadth of her career. I picked it up as a fan of Dillard's novel The Living.

Annie Dillard's prose is like poetry –– not in the sense of having a lyrical cadence or figurative language, but by having vivid, expressive images surrounded by abstruse metaphysical pondering. Dillard looks to achieve ecstatic states through deep attention to the everyday world. For example, she'll spend a page describing the spider web in a corner behind the toilet and the insect "corpses" in it, which leads to a story about a moth that flew into a candle and began to act as a wick.

Her close attention pays off in beautiful and distinctive images, not to mention that it encourages similar attention from me. However, a perplexing abstract idea is rarely far behind. A couple of examples:

• She awakes to find that her cat has walked across her and left her "covered with paw prints in blood; it looked as though I'd been painted with roses." She also says "my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp." Nice, distinctive, concrete. Then: "What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain."
• She makes her leisurely way to an island in the middle of Tinker Creek, straddles a sycamore log, and settles in to read. "I'm drawn to this spot. I come to it as an oracle: I return to it as a man years later will seek out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm."

To quote Eudora Welty from her review of a Dillard book: "I honestly do not know what she is talking about."

Ultimately I'm willing to tolerate the abstraction to luxuriate in the lovely, relaxing, and though-provoking imagery. I may seek out Dillard's one other foray into fiction, The Maytrees.