NONFICTION - April 10, 1994

AN UNSPOKEN HUNGER: Stories From the Field by Terry Tempest Williams. (Pantheon: $21; 160 pp.) Between Barry Lopez, Wallace Stegner, Jim Harrison, Susan Griffin and others, Terry Tempest Williams is in blurb heaven with this new book. Williams has influenced, cajoled, delighted, annoyed and mostly cracked open many, many readers. Very unlike another wonderful writer, Penelope Lively (reviewed above), there seems to be little standing between Williams and childhood--its textures, its porous sensuality, its pure joy, its sentimentality and its instincts. Strangely like Virginia Woolf, Williams seems to live on the level of myth and symbol, and when she bumps into things, like shabby environmental legislation, nuclear testing, family members dying of cancer, she graces them with her compassion and her transforming imagination. This is a woman a sick planet would want to cozy up to. “A man or woman whose mind reins in the heart,” she writes, “when the body sings desperately for connection can only expect more isolation and greater ecological disease.” Sometimes we read to be drawn out of ourselves and sometimes, I think, to dive back in. Williams, somehow, gets us coming and going.