And then I read Heaney, specifically his first book, Death of a Naturalist, which he’d written, it seemed obvious to me, out of the same tangle of mute, inchoate pain and free-singing elation: “The plash and gurgle of the sour-breathed milk, / the pat and slap of small spades on wet lumps.” John of Patmos gets an angel to break his brain open. My own rapture required merely a table set with sonic objects. Butter, Heaney means in that last line, though you feel the words themselves are also the subject, rendered stark and palpable and ungainsayable from the linguistic “churn” of the poem (“Churning Day”).
But pain? The poem’s about churning butter, for God’s sake. But the pain has to do with coming to consciousness, that huge first heave a young poet must make from sensation to representation, and the further and even harder heave to solder a seam between them with a singular sound. At twenty-three, I sensed, even among the bucolic subject matter, that Heaney had gone through what I was going through, and there are plenty of passages in these letters that confirm my early instinct. “It is about the artist and his relation to society,” he writes to the painter Barrie Cooke in 1985, nominally about Sophocles’ Philoctetes but transparently personal. “His right to his wound, his solitude, his resentment. Yet society’s right (?) to his gift, his bow, his commitment to the group.” Heaney is speaking of political obligations, but to make the transition I’m referring to—to translate one’s inner imperative into a form that can be shared—is, no matter how private the writer, a “commitment to the group.” The success Heaney had at negotiating this tension was a fortifying example.
The where’s and when’s of extinctions just don’t line up with global patterns of climate change, according to the data the researchers collected and analyzed, but they do correspond closely with patterns of human colonization—occurring at or after our arrival in many distinct times and places around the globe.
I’d guess that most of us who have the privilege of writing for children have heard from readers who’ve escaped into our books after conflicts with friends or parents, during cross-country moves, or in times of illness, anxiety, or grief. Books help kids persevere. And because a few of those kids and their families have shared stories like these with me, I’ve come to think of building escape pods as my most important creative duty. I want to help young readers explore big ideas, of course, and spark their love of language, and encourage them to ask heaps of questions—but more than any of that, I want to give them a literary refuge when they need it most.
The result is what may be the best novel in this fine series. The quirky characters are well drawn, the prose is tight, the pace is furious, the surprises keep coming and the violent climax is nothing less than savage.