NONFICTION - April 19, 1992

A GARLIC TESTAMENT: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm by Stanley Crawford (HarperCollins/Edward Burlingame: $20; 244 pp.). “The fact of the matter,” writes Stanley Crawford about book-learning in this book, “may be that by the time the written words do finally arrive . . . the truth has been sitting around waiting on the edges, in the ditches, by the side of the road, for the longest time.” Crawford came to northern New Mexico in 1969 as a published novelist and only “stumbled” into farming, but it’s clear that he was already at a point in his life where words were not enough; writing had its place, but “better perhaps to stay at home and grow your patch of garlic, and to dream in winter your subterranean dreams . . . of light, of warmth, and of liberation.” “A Garlic Testament” is very much about the act of farming--sowing, watering, fertilizing, tilling, reaping and eventually going to market--but beneath the surface it’s a paean to life lived by the seasons. For this garlic seems a good metaphor, because it slows the farmer down, being leisurely in maturation. Crawford, between the lines, gives the reader a new reason to prefer the turtle’s way to that of the hare.