NONFICTION - July 30, 1995

DWELLINGS by Linda Hogan (Norton: $22; 158 pp.) Linda Hogan begins this collection of essays with one of those rare experiences most people have at least tasted: We ask for something and it comes to us. Something impossible, something we cannot force to happen by an act of will. The book is full of miracles, from bats making love to dream-hunting to the way an earthen jug made for carrying water brings the coolness of wind and the taste of mountains into the water. “That water jar was a reminder of how water and earth love each other the way they do, meeting at night, at the shore . . . in the give and take that is where grace comes from.” Hogan is a storyteller, a “noticer” and she is more delightful to read when she weaves connections between the things she sees than when she tells us about what she knows. This doesn’t mean we don’t learn from her, it’s just that sometimes she tells , for example: “The Western belief that God lives apart from earth is one that has taken us toward collective destruction,” and sometimes she sings : the bats “were an ink black world hanging from a rafter. The graceful angles of their dark wings opened and jutted out like an elbow or knee poking through a thin, dark sheet. A moment later it was a black, silky shawl pulled tight around them.”

Hogan is also a poet (“Seeking Through the Sun” and “The Book of Medicines”), and when she writes it is with a lyrical rhythm, as in this description of a sweat lodge ceremony: “We speak. We sing . . . By the end of the ceremony, it is as if skin contains land and birds . . . The stones come to dwell inside the person. Gold rolling hills take up residence . . . The red light of canyons is there.”