BOOK REVIEW : Emptiness and Stillness of Life on High Plains : DAKOTA: A SPIRITUAL GEOGRAPHY <i> By Kathleen Norris</i> ; Ticknor & Fields; $19.95; 225 pages

Twenty years ago, Kathleen Norris and her husband, David Dwyer, moved from New York City to Lemmon, S.D. Her grandparents had lived and farmed there; their house and property were left to the family, and Norris was to manage them on the family’s behalf.

The returns from the arid High Plains soil were skimpy. Dwyer wrote computer programs, did French translations and got involved in a local cable TV outfit. Norris taught, worked in libraries and traveled for the state’s art-in-schools program.

They are poets, and what they found in this bare northwestern corner of the Dakotas kept them there beyond the two or three years they had originally planned.

It was emptiness, Norris tells us, as well as the big sky and a sense of both stillness and movement in a landscape that she compares to the ocean. Sea gulls appear sometimes over the plateau that runs from the west bank of the Missouri to the Montana Rockies.

Emptiness, in various senses, is the theme of a book that is partly a journal of particular observations of the land and life in the upland Dakotas but is principally, as the subtitle indicates, a spiritual meditation growing out of the particulars.

Norris avails herself of two Christian traditions to sink taproots into the emptiness and bring nourishment up out of it. One is that of the desert mystics; the other is the fruitful spareness of Benedictine monasticism.

It is in the particulars that “Dakota” is most successful; we wish, in fact, that there were more of them. Norris is good on winds and weather, on the sudden fogs and snowy whiteouts that are like the sky falling, on the stark and vivid shifts of color in an austere landscape.

She is even better at capturing the shining moments in others’ speech. Nothing in the book better fixes the majesty of plains solitude than her conversation with a small boy whose family had moved from Pennsylvania.

Back home, he told her, he used to see an angel named Andy Le Beau. Does he still see Andy? she asked. “Don’t you know?” he demanded. “This is the place where angels drown.”

A child also serves to voice the poverty of a state where thousands of farmers have failed, where teachers’ salaries rank 50th in the nation and where the Indians live at an impoverished sub-level.

Asking the students in one remote rural school to try their hand at poetry, she was astonished when an Indian girl turned out 20 poems in a single sitting. “I don’t have paper at home,” she said, “So I keep them in my head. That’s where they live until I write them down.”

She writes of the dying rural communities and the demoralized inhabitants of Lemmon, which, with a population of 1,600, is the largest town in northwest South Dakota.

Their possibly admirable independence, she writes, has been turned by hard times into an intense suspicion of any form of cooperation to improve things.

Would-be improvers are distrusted; one school changed principals six times in eight years. A church treasurer was edged out because she was “too well organized.” The local librarian refused an inter-library hook-up because she thought it reflected badly on her own holdings.

Norris quotes a local minister on the Western Dakota ethos. “We need outsiders here but often end up repelling them, especially professionals, especially ministers,” he said. “Prairie people know they do this. And hidden in their rejection . . . is a seed by which they set themselves up to be exploited and then abandoned over and over again.”

The author contrasts this stunted reaction before the austerity of Plains life with quotations from the early Desert Mystics. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, speaks of sin as “the refusal to grow.”

Although she is a Protestant, she is an oblate--a kind of auxiliary--at a Benedictine monastery, and she has interesting things to say about how such a spare and enclosed community can maintain a sense of joyful individuality.

Norris’ purpose is to urge the possibility of convergence between the arid High Plains and the desert that nourished the medieval ascetics, between the sour Plains communities and the banked but steady energies of a monastery.

In this, the heart of her book, she does not succeed very well. The effort is suggestive but forced.

Although the author writes well, she lacks the demanding gifts of a mystical poet--or a Thoreau or a Thomas Merton--to make her vision of a fruitful emptiness come to life. She points to it more than she shows it. We see her in the act of seeing; we don’t quite see what she sees.