Discoveries

Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

Mary Oliver

Da Capo Press: 102 pp., $22

Reading a writer over decades makes true discovery possible. Fans of poet-essayist Mary Oliver have had many chances to see what inspires her unique and powerful insight: nature, small and large. In this collection, we also hear the voices that inhabit her -- Hawthorne, Wordsworth, Poe and especially Emerson. Take this simple observation of a young friend: “She seems to be in a kind of friendly correspondence with the sail and the wind.” That is how literature evolves and acknowledges past writers, echo by echo. Another discovery: Oliver is happy. The lightness, the airiness of her sheer delight in life curls around paragraphs and prose poems like disappearing fog. A reader misses the angst and edge at times, but Oliver seems to have entered the state the monks and saints describe. “Once, years ago, I emerged from the woods in the early morning at the end of a walk and -- it was the most casual of moments -- as I stepped from under the trees, into the road, into the mild, pouring down sunlight, I experienced a sudden impact, a seizure of happiness. It was not the drowning sort of happiness, rather the floating source. I made no struggle toward it; it was given. Time seemed to vanish. Urgency vanished. Any important difference between myself and all other things vanished.” Oliver avoids preachiness by keeping her eye on the real and the small: a goosefish, her dog, the weather. She’s stopped looking. She just sees.

*

The Last Best League: One Summer, One Season, One Dream

Jim Collins

Da Capo Press: 270 pp., $21.95

ThE Chatham A’s are a Cape Cod baseball league team, the best of nine summer college leagues in the country, maybe even “the most exclusive amateur league in the world,” writes Jim Collins. One of every six players drafted into the major leagues each year comes from the team. He follows three team players in the summer of 2002: super cool Jamie D’Antona from Connecticut, reserved and determined Tim Stauffer from upstate New York and Thomas Pauley, a wild card from Florida. They have eaten and drunk baseball from the time they were old enough to walk. The players are analyzed at the local deli, at gas stations and supermarkets, by coaches, scouts and parents. Everything is seen through the lens of baseball. The boys take personality tests to determine if they have the drive and tenacity to make it in the pros. In the end, their fates are decided by a dozen executives in a room on New York City’s Park Avenue. Collins writes of many moments of grace and beauty, but somewhere the fun is lost. Those little boys who slept with their gloves and spent hours at the batting cage are fed, arms and legs, grades and girlfriends, to the great American sports machine.

*

Hash: A Novel

Torgny Lindgren

Overlook: 236 pp., $23.95

TWO tragic characters, an ex-war criminal and a teacher recently released from a tuberculosis sanitarium, search for the truth and the perfect hash in Swedish writer Torgny Lindgren’s funny novel. The narrator is a 107-year-old newspaperman who began his report at 53. That’s when a letter arrived from his editor, calling his work “completely devoid of any basis in fact” and exhorting him not to write another word. “The dramatic weeklong struggle to rescue an elk from Hoback Marsh never took place,” the editor writes. “No unknown celestial body with shimmering corona ever rose above your horizon. There has never been a turkey farm ravaged by a bear in your district.” But when the editor dies, the newspaperman resumes his report. The hash-seekers visit 23 towns in a single summer tasting hash: Avaback hash, Lillaberg hash, Raggsjo hash, Amtrask hash (with a “tantalizing hint of juniper berries”) and finally Ellen’s hash from Lillsjoliden. “Once you tasted that, everything else was no more than ersatz hash or makeshift hash.” All this from the imagination of the newspaperman in a nursing home in Sweden.