From Publishers Weekly
In this lyrical memoir, Morrow (The Names of Things) muses on New York State's Finger Lake region, where she grew up. Her ruminations are loosely based on her memories of two men—one a trapper, the other a beekeeper—whose ability to connect with nature had a profound influence on the way she views the world. In a poetic narrative, she contemplates the natural history of the area and tells of the people who have inhabited it—the Seneca, spiritualists, fur traders, artists, scholars, scientists and nurserymen. Morrow goes beyond the obvious, allowing each observation to remind her of something else and searching for the inner meaning of words. The sight of a flock of crows, for example, reminds her of a poem by the Greek poet Pindar, and this leads to a meditation on what it means to be a poet. The apple tree, which grows so plentifully in the region, is a "talisman that one could follow through the layers of Finger Lake soil, through layers of memory and history," and this prompts thoughts on the Swedenborgian missionary John Chapman (known as Johnny Appleseed), spiritualism, the molecular structure of sweetness, Lucretius and the origin of apples in the mountains of Kazakhstan. Morrow's language is rich and sensuous, for she thinks like a poet. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
A linguist, naturalist, and classicist, Morrow, whose previous book, The Names of Things (1997), celebrated the austere landscapes of Egypt and Sudan, has turned her discerning eye toward the history of upstate New York. For Morrow, to be human is to see the numinous in the ordinary, a gift she learned in part from two of her neighbors, a beekeeper and a trapper. The author describes the marshlands, meadows, and woods of the narrow lakes area--and its residents--as existing in a kind of metaphorical cross-pollination. Fittingly, it is the trapper who recognizes the misnamed eastern coyote as the Algonquin red wolf, and whose knowledge is "a rare and precious thing, a remnant of an older world." Each concise essay contains riches. A meditation on apples, for instance, outlines not only the history of William Smith and other nurserymen of the Finger Lakes, but also the rise of spiritualism, and the discovery of a rare strain of the fruit in the Tien Shan mountains in Kazakhstan. Rebecca Maksel
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Each concise essay contains riches."

Book Description
Susan Brind Morrow brings her singular sensibility as a classicist and linguist to this strikingly original reflection on the fine but resilient threads that bind humans to the natural world. Anchored in the emblematic experiences of a trapper and a beekeeper, Wolves and Honey explores the implications of their very different relationships to the natural world, while illuminating Morrow"s own poignant experience of the lives and tragic deaths of these men who deeply influenced her. Ultimately for Morrow these two — the tracker and trapper of wolves, the keeper of bees — are a touchstone for a memoir of the land itself, the rich soil of the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York. From the ancient myth of the Tree of Life to the mysterious reappearance of wolves in the New York wilderness, from the inner life of the word "nectar," whose Greek root ("that which overcomes death") reveals our most fundamental experience of wonder, to the surprising links between the physics of light and the chemistry of sweetness, Morrow"s richly evocative writing traces startling historical, scientific, and metaphorical resonances. Wolves and Honey, attuned to the connections among various realms of culture and nature, time and language, jolts us into thinking anew about our sometimes neglected but always profound relationship to the natural world.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1The Wood DuckLast night i dreamt I saw Bob Kime. I knew we were sayinggoodbye. I held him tight. Then he took off his jacket and gave it tome. It was a hunting jacket, soft and old, sort of bruised, I thought,and very dear. And then he was gone.I always thought of Bob as my own particular friend, but at thefuneral home on Friday people were lined up down the block, peopleI didn"t know.We waited in line for an hour and a half just to getinto the room to approach the open casket where his body lay. Shawnwas standing beside the casket, having very much his father"s face.Had I seen the picture in the back? he said. A photograph tacked on aboard among dozens of others—of Bob with his dogs, with Shawn,with snow geese on the ground at their feet—and with them one ofme and Bob in our bee suits in his old red pickup twenty years ago.Last Sunday I almost called him up to ask about a hive. But then Ithought, Bob will think this is pathetic,my calling like this, as thoughnothing has changed after all these years. If only I had called him. Foron Monday he shot himself.Like the many times I have gone out to watch the moon rise,only to find it has risen, huge and gold and silent in a place where Ihave failed to look, I had missed the point, and the point was aimeddeep into my own life, into the golden territory of the familiar.At the funeral on Saturday morning Terry was there, sitting inthe back row a few feet from where I stood. At first I didn"t see him.Terry is in his sixties now. His black hair is white. But there were thehuge sloping shoulders, the same large head, the gold outline of theglasses he has worn these last ten years as he turned to laugh with theperson beside him, some stranger on edge, as we all were, in the dimyellow light of the crowded room, Bob"s soft profile, like somethingset in stone, occasionally visible through the rows of people shiftinglike rows of corn in the wind. When everyone rose to leave after theservice was over I leaned forward and slipped my fingers into Terry"slarge rough hand. "Well, Suzy," he said, "all your buddies are gonenow."When I was growing up we thought Terry was a Cherokee Indian. Itturned out that he was simply from California, and even though hehad a crew cut and was something of a math whiz, and was also, it occurredto me only later, all the while a scientist and a chemistry professorat Cornell, he was our only real experience of the sixties, of anunconventional person. For a large man, who could easily have beenthreatening, he had an atmosphere of total ease, of kindness, and Ihad taken refuge in the safety of his presence for maybe thirty years.Later Lan and I drove down East Lake Road where the Kimefields lay in soft shining squares of pale green oats and darker soy andgolden wheat, patched like a lovely quilt in a rolling sweep down towardthe dark blue line of Seneca Lake. The Kime barns and dwarfapple trees and farmhouse—large and white and square, the way thefarmhouses are there, with a square windowed cupola on top whereone can sit and see out over the fields—stood by the road lined withmaple trees, as they have stood from the earliest days of my life.Beside the bluestone marker just beyond—a gravestone carvedin the shape of a dog, a curious antique—a dirt road leads down toAnne and Terry"s cottage on a bluff above the lake, the burnt-outshell of an old log cabin of dark wood, polished now and screened, sothat it recedes within a line of tall white pines and is almost invisible.Anne has cancer, and has taken on a kind of translucence afterthese last months of illness, as though her fine blond hair were re-fined to silver.Her blue-green eyes had a radiance that surprised us aswe walked in and saw her, for the first time in maybe a year.We sat and watched the sun go down across the lake belowthrough the broken black outlines of the trees. The faint flicker of arainbow formed for an instant in the low sky to the north, as thoughit were the rim of something suddenly visible, a shining fragment ofthe rim of a halo. The last light fell in a wave of gold that sweptquickly around the room, settling for amoment on each of us in turn.We sat quietly talking in the dark, in what seemed like a box of deepblue light, as we had in summers past, so that the evening had aboutit a sense of timelessness.I reminded Terry of how once he said that everything operateson the level of four basic elements, their combining and breakingdown, and that we are all "just some spectacular sideshow," as thoughall the desperate suffering of life were simply an elaboration of thisbasic principle."What is it that makes a human being?" he had said. "Whatdefines being human? Falling in love. And what is that? Seeing somethingordinary as . . .numinous."He thought amoment. "Seeing. Theintensity of that focus, that concentration of energy, would be theheating up in which some significant transformation could take place."Last Monday night a friend of mine called to say that she hadheard a scream, a terrifying, almost human sound, and outside founda newborn fawn, still wet fromits mother, and all around it black vulturesin the trees."Bob talked a lot of people out of trees,"Terry said, rememberinghow I first went to him, just wanting to be around that kind of man,a hunter, the year my brother died, "but nobody was there for him."When we were children, barely able to walk, my parents would takeus out into the middle of Seneca Lake and toss us off the side of theirboat into the deep green water. Although we could float in our lifejackets, and there was the electric touch of the water itself, the lakeseemed dense and bottomless—heavy matter, like a skin not easilyshaken free. We had an instinctive dread of what could drift upthrough that heavy medium from below—the immense primordialsturgeon, like pale ghosts, plated in hard ridges of leathery gray.The lake was something that we knew by heart, through ourbodily senses as they themselves were formed.In those days there were only simple cottages in the bays, littleclapboard houses of one story, painted blue or white or gray. The narrowwater-worn docks of splintery wood stretched out into the wateron thin pipes rarely more than a hundred feet.The fields behind them glittered with the multiplicity of summerlife, speckled red beetles on the milkweed leaves, the fragrance ofthe milkweed unbearably sweet, its gummy milk bleeding into ourhands, the seed pods, their skin like pale knobby velvet, pulled back toreveal a tight silver-white pattern of satin-rimmed scales. The seedsformed the body of a tiny fish—a fish made of silk you could pull topieces and float away.When we first came to the cottage it was full of old things: akind of old pine green and teal blue tinged with gray, lined plates ofpale blue glass, heavy stoneware, a fieldstone fireplace, and, before it,a bearskin rug smelling of bacon grease, and after we were there,mounted fish on the walls—the walleye I had caught in AlgonquinPark that was patterned green and gold, with its tall reptilian dorsalfin (how often we would get the spines of fish fins stuck in our fingersin those days, and soak them out with Epsom salts).My parents bought the place with all its contents, and there werea lot of old books, Gene Stratton-Porter"s A Girl of the Limberlost—the story of a girl who put herself through school collecting raremoths in the swamps of Mackinaw—and The Keeper of the Bees,about aWorldWar I veteran dying in a war hospital, who got up andstaggered away, and found a garden on the sea filled with flowers inevery shade of blue, a garden filled with skeps and bees.World War I and, after the terrible shock of that war, the solacein the eternal presence of nature, were pervasive elements in the atmosphereof the place. My mother was formed by the aftermath ofthat war, and the books in the cottage were embedded with a sense ofthe time, like the musty smell embedded in their pages.There was one green book, The Bird Study Book, with a goldenmoon pressed in relief on its cover, and flying across the goldenmoon a dark flock of geese. Years later the cover remained like a sealimpression in my mind, although I had forgotten the book itself. Oneday in New York I called the astronomy department at ColumbiaUniversity and said, "Can you see geese flying across the full moon?"Their reply, after I was put on hold for a minute, was "Yes. Whenthere are geese flying across the full moon."My brother David became a duck hunter in his early teens. We usedto go out in the boat so he could practice sighting the birds in flight ata distance around the lake when the migrations came through in thefall. We were used to seeing flocks of ducks settled on the icy waternear the crumbling old stone pier as our father drove us to school inthe morning down Hamilton Street. They had a mottled quality thatalmost shone in the crisp clear air. Some were beautifully patchedwith white—buffleheads and goldeneyes among the canvasbacksand redheads.One Christmas Eve David appeared on the porch in the darkin the moss green hunting jacket my mother had made for him byhand, with a brace of canvasbacks over his shoulder. My motherwould later say, "How I remember his Adam"s apple bobbing in histhroat!" David, thin and blond as he was then, having recently comeback as an eagle scout from Philmont, which made him even more ofan outdoorsman—always up at 4:00. There he stood with the glovesoftwhite breasts of the ducks, their burgundy, oddly shaped headsspilling down the front of his jacket.How cold it was, the film of shiningdark ice on the walk, the hard snow sparkling white beneath thetrees, and my mother saying, "Well, you can pluck them outside!"But David and I went down to the basement and spread outnewspapers on the floor. I remember the sense of the gathered tensionof the feathers as they ripped out from the skin with a soft puckeringsound, the feathers coming loose in my hands, the soft innerdown full of mites. Redheads, buffleheads, canvasbacks—the meatgamy and tough, tasting of fish, full of shot, the shot falling loose onthe plate as you cut the dark-stained meat. The circular burn aroundthe shot burned into the flesh remained, although we cooked thebirds in wine for a long time.When we were children David and I used to catch things justto look at them, and sometimes kill them to see what was inside.One summer we found a mudpuppy under the dock, purple andsplotched, with gills that blossomed out like the purple buds of a Judastree, and perfectly fingered hands.We buried it on the shore andlater dug it up to see its beautifully articulated thin white bones.My father was a lawyer, and we lived in town. But somehow for us aschildren our great experiences had to do with being outside. I have aphotograph of David and me standing in the Canada woods—Davidin a soft blue cloth jacket with a white blond crew cut, me in fadedcorduroy lined with plaid.We are tiny beneath the tall trees amid themasses of green ferns. I am holding a magnifying glass toward theground, and looking up. Thus is a life spun together through layers ofsense impressions, the light speckling through the trees, the smell ofdead leaves and damp earth. For me the elusive thing of value hasever been the golden light of kerosene lamps, walls of thin blondwood, tarpaper tacked over a table, some smell of damp, and just beyond—the rich outlying darkness.When David died in 1981 I was studying Greek in New York. I stillhave taped above my desk a fragment from Ibycus:Tou men petaloisin ep" akrotatoisIzanoisi poikilai aiolodeiroiPanelopes lathiporphurides te kaiAlkuoves tanusipteroiIn these lines of early Greek poetry key words are mysteries, becausethe author made them up. And they were never used again. Allone can do is break them down into their component parts, and thenguess what the composite might mean. It reminded me of ooliticstone: in the words, as in the thing described, the beauty lay in theflaws themselves, the irregularities—the speckling, the splotching,the mixing up.There was aiolodeiroi—throats that shone with their dapplingof color—with aiolos implying a moving brightness, a glittering, aspeckling, as in aiola nux, the starry sky.The fragment went something like this:Among the highest leaves they sat—The mottled ducks, with throatsThat almost shone;And halcyonsthat secretly grow redwith wings outstretched.One could only think, reading this, of the American wood duckwith its shining splotches of color, its white speckled throat, its silverbluewings like the panes in cathedral windows. I don"t know if thereis another duck that lives in trees. The wood duck was a rare birdwhen I was growing up. Its populations had been decimated by thenineteenth-century fashion industry. I had never seen one, only inpictures in books.The hardest word was lathiporphurides—with porphyry, a wordthat means brightness itself, an emphatic doubling of the word forliving brightness—pur, fire, the moving brightness of burning red,or the heaving of the sea with its glittering changing light. Here attachedto lathi, meaning "in stealth." The Greek dictionary made aleap into the violence implicit in the color red, and translated theword "feeds in the dark."I can"t remember the day I met Bob Kime, he came into my life soquietly, and was so utterly familiar.My father and I would sometimes stop by his house near thelake on Sunday afternoons when some of his friends were over shootingclay pigeons. The men would be standing in a line, with great seriousnessof purpose, aiming and shooting down the little clay discs asthey were flung into the air out of the machine with a rapid clickingnoise.I was never much of a shot, but when I was growing up it wasconsidered important to know how to handle a gun. I had been targetshooting from the age of eight. As a teenager I had my ownRemington, and later even a pistol permit. There was a great deal ofpleasure in sighting the discs as they fell rapidly through the sky, pullingthe trigger, and seeing them shatter into pieces.Bob would be standing in the line all the while, casually jokingas we all were. When one of us missed, he would stop midsentence,raise his shotgun to his shoulder with a certain ease, and pick off thedisc before it hit the ground.He was an ordinary man of medium build, with dark hair anddark eyebrows. But he had a kind of antique face: soft features, eyesset a little wide apart, the kind of face one might imagine an Americanfarmer having had a century or two ago—and indeed his familyhad been farming the land on the east side of Seneca Lake for along time.But most characteristic of him (so that one might not noticeother things—I can"t remember what he wore) was a kind of brightness.He had, one might have said, a beautiful radiance: he was a manwho saw things, who saw things and understood them.One October evening after we were friends he took me out tothe Junius swamps.We stood in waist-high waders in the cold murkywater amid the water-rotted trees, some still standing, with the faintpink hands of remnant leaves floating on frail elongated stems up tothe surface, some gnawed down by beaver into flaking points like palisades.The sky was silver blue with a film of cloud, but we could seethe stars come through in the early dark.We watched the ducks fly up in gathered bursts, and tried to seewhat they were in the half-light, by the pattern of their wing beats,their patches of white. For some reason we didn"t bother to shoot atanything.At Christmas that year Bob brought me a wood duck. I hadasked him that October night if he had ever seen one.Copyright © 2004 by Susan Brind Morrow. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Take a ride through nature on a hummingbird's back! In her gem of a book, Susan Brind Morrow flits reverently through the natural world, focusing intently on a specific facet to extract only precious nectar before winging her way on to the next discovery.

An exploration of the natural realm requires a sense of wonder, which Morrow enlivens with historical curiosity and an eye for the mysterious as careful as a trapper's nose for a trail. A naturalist, linguist, and classicist, Morrow brings readers a meditation upon the meaning of nature in relation to seemingly disparate realms: the natural and the cultural, the literal and the metaphorical, tradition and science, the temporal and the transcendent. Wolves & Honey also introduces an old-style trapper and an intuitive beekeeper, men who struggle to survive on their respective frontiers, continually pressed upon by a shrinking wilderness. The author's special friendship with these men creates a touchstone for exploration as symbolic as her memories are personal, offering an inspired rendering of the natural world diffuse with poetry and suffused with luminous beauty.

With writing evocative of Annie Dillard and a sprinkling of the classicism found in the writing of Anne Carson, Susan Brind Morrow has carved out a wonderful place of her own in the forest of works on nature. (Fall 2004 Selection)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Susan Brind Morrow brings her singular sensibility as a classicist and linguist to this strikingly original reflection on the fine but resilient threads that bind humans to the natural world. Anchored in the emblematic experiences of a trapper and a beekeeper, Wolves and Honey explores the implications of their very different connections to nature, while illuminating Morrow's own poignant relationship with the lives and tragic deaths of these men who deeply influenced her. Ultimately for Morrow, these two -- the tracker and trapper of wolves, the keeper of bees -- are a touchstone for a memoir of the land itself, the rich soil of the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York. From the ancient myth of the Tree of Life to the mysterious reappearance of wolves in the New York wilderness, from the inner life of the word "nectar," whose Greek root ("that which overcomes death") reveals our most fundamental experience of wonder, to the surprising links between the physics of light and the chemistry of sweetness, Morrow's evocative writing traces startling historical, scientific, and metaphorical resonances. Wolves and Honey, attuned to the connections among various realms of culture and nature, time and language, jolts us into thinking anew about our sometimes neglected but always profound relationship to the natural world.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New Yorker

The Finger Lakes region of western New York is remote from much of the state, and, unlike the Hamptons, the Catskills, and the Adirondacks, was never really settled by summer people. It is nevertheless a beautiful and somewhat mysterious part of America—with long, clean lakes, hidden valleys, and towns bearing Greek names like Hector and Ithaca—and was the birthplace of Mormonism, spiritualism, and the American women’s-suffrage movement. Morrow grew up in Geneva, at the north end of Seneca Lake (where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s doomed Dick Diver ended up). Her short, affecting book is partly a memoir recalling the habits of bees, the return of wolves, and “a life spun together through layers of sense impressions,” and also a meditation on the outdoors that evokes “the smell of damp earth, the sweetness of maples and pines . . . as though it were freedom itself.”

Publishers Weekly

In this lyrical memoir, Morrow (The Names of Things) muses on New York State's Finger Lake region, where she grew up. Her ruminations are loosely based on her memories of two men-one a trapper, the other a beekeeper-whose ability to connect with nature had a profound influence on the way she views the world. In a poetic narrative, she contemplates the natural history of the area and tells of the people who have inhabited it-the Seneca, spiritualists, fur traders, artists, scholars, scientists and nurserymen. Morrow goes beyond the obvious, allowing each observation to remind her of something else and searching for the inner meaning of words. The sight of a flock of crows, for example, reminds her of a poem by the Greek poet Pindar, and this leads to a meditation on what it means to be a poet. The apple tree, which grows so plentifully in the region, is a "talisman that one could follow through the layers of Finger Lake soil, through layers of memory and history," and this prompts thoughts on the Swedenborgian missionary John Chapman (known as Johnny Appleseed), spiritualism, the molecular structure of sweetness, Lucretius and the origin of apples in the mountains of Kazakhstan. Morrow's language is rich and sensuous, for she thinks like a poet. Agent, Tina Bennett. (July) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This wonderful glimpse into the natural world of the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York blends nature, society, horticulture, agriculture, and history. Native son and linguist Morrow (The Names of Things) starts with the deaths of two beloved friends who were deeply rooted in the region's natural world. Eloquently covering a large natural canvas, moving back and forth between the present and the past, Morrow brings to life the uniqueness of this region as well as the meaning of remembrance and responsibility toward family and friends. Recommended for all natural history and New York collections.-Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences, RTP, NC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews