Book Review: The Rocky Orchard
The Rocky Orchard. Barbara Monier. Northfield, IL: Amika Press, May 12, 2020, Trade Paperback and E-book, 172 pages.
Reviewed by Caryl Barnes.
On the back cover of The Rocky Orchard, the new book by Barbara Monier, a reviewer says you’ll want to reread it the minute you finish. I've read that promise on the back covers of other books and was skeptical. I had never once wanted to reread a book the second I finished it. This one book, though, I did reread right away, and I have since reread it.
Mazie’s account of her life is so broad and so deep that I wanted to absorb it. The Rocky Orchard is at first glance short and simple with lovely but straightforward language. It is not a difficult read despite its rambles through various dimensions of time and space.
Why then is it so compelling that I had to reread it? I wanted to see what Mazie saw, feel what she felt, think what she thought, and experience what she experienced, and to a startling extent, Monier’s book enabled me to do that. The book is so present, so alive. A writer in a review of another book said something that applies to The Rocky Orchard: “We get the immediacy of voice, characters pressing themselves on us without any apparent authorial filter in a continuous oral present, even when they are relating their own histories.”
A few years ago, I went on a long nature walk with a group from my church. Our purpose was to learn to see more clearly, to connect with nature. When one of us noticed something along the trail, they stopped, and the group stopped with them. We all looked, and as best we could, we entered into the living reality of what we saw. It was an uncanny experience, becoming one with objects of nature as well as with oneself and the other members of the group. Together and individually, we joined what we saw in a powerful experience of embodied mysticism. The Rocky Orchard offers a similar experience as Mazie revisits details of her life, paring it to its essential, burning inner core. We watch Mazie become who she is and know herself for the first time. In so doing, I learned more about who I am.
There are hundreds of stops along Mazie’s path. Sometimes she relives the past: standing unprotected at age four at the edge of the Grand Canyon, one shoe sticking over the rim. Sometimes she notices a detail in the present: old playing cards being shuffled, “fall in beautiful, slow motion,” as if they understand what they’re supposed to do. Sometimes she gasps at a new insight: how miraculously different each hour is from every other. Sometimes she imagines in vivid detail something that may not have happened: marrying Eddie at the “crossroads of the farm.”
The Rocky Orchard is a lesson in meditation. Beginning meditators are taught to follow their breath, to let the thoughts and visions come and then, as quickly as they arrive, to let them go and return to the breath. I know, from experience, how numerous and varied my thoughts are. In daily life, my thoughts tumble atop each other, are crowded and often unnoticed, as a new thought shoves the old one out of the way. Observing my thoughts as they drift by and then returning to breathing gives my observations, experiences, and ideas room develop, to exist in the present, no matter how momentary the present is. Meditation is a profound way to honor oneself.
This review was challenging to write because I tried to describe what felt like a mystical experience with this book, grounded in the most specific of details yet ethereal as a cloud. There are other ways I could have talked about this book—about the plot, about the way human beings have many parts of ourselves (including inner guides like Lula), and about the metaphysics of the book. I chose to write about what stunned me, what erased the difference between reading a book and being drawn within a book.