The Bookshelf, The Parlor, The Young Texas Reader, and the Monthly

The Texas Bookshelf is different from the The Texas Parlor, http://texasparlor.blogspot.com/ . The Texas Parlor carries "general" bookish information and non-book information and even different Texana news and notes of use to the bibliographically challenged and other nosey folks intersted in historical, literary, and cultural observations. Will's Texana Monthly may carry material from either blog, but extends itself beyond those, especially for longer compilations or treatments. The Monthly, the Bookshelf and the Parlor are all companions. So, is the Young Texas Reader http://youngtexasreader.blogspot.com/ which specialized on books and such things for the youngest to the teenagers.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Twilight Innings - Robert A. Fink


Twilight Innings: A West Texan on Grace and Survival.

By Robert A. Fink

Foreword by R. S. Gwynn. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2006. xvi, 152 pages. ISBN 0896725847 $24.95 cloth http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/

Robert A. Fink is W. D. and Hollis R. Bond Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas. He is known as the author of several books of poetry, but Twlight Innings collects essays from eleven diverse sources. He takes readers from his childhood and rearing in East Texas, to college, to Vietnam, and finally to Abilene where the sparseness of topography, sound, and people permit healing of wartime assaults, assuaged by academic acceptance of his poetic and Christian sensibilities. The Abilene sparseness is enriched by the common wealth shared by many places. He records “Accepting the call to Abilene means you’re among people who love a lot more than poetry.”

Old friends and ghosts sway amid students, family, and school counselors. They populate home, school, Sunday school, the rangeland, and the Guadalupe Mountains. Prairie Dog baseball enlivens metaphor, stabilizes reality and rescues the perishing.

Fink would offer you a hard rubber sphere wrapped in strings, covered by soft leather and ask you to feel the stitches. Take it.

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