sewn paper
e-mail the
Author The cover is after a
Fiction
Fall 1996
240 pages
ISBN 0-88984-184-5
$16.95
painting by Wanda Koop,
Untitled (Cattellya
Orchid and one Brazilian
Hummingbird), 1989.
The Garden of Earthly Intimacies
Meeka WalshThe lyrical and precise stories in The Garden of Earthly Intimacies achieve an intensity that touches on the rhapsodic. Few characters in recent Canadian fiction are as responsive to the sensual richness of the world as the women who inhabit these beautifully transparent stories. Whether they're stepping into a warm bath recently abandoned by an elusive, imaginary lover, or stepping onto the pure whiteness of an isolated Mexican beach, the women in Meeka Walsh's fictional garden carry themselves forward in a glistening exquisite dance.
These stories also tell, with uncanny accuracy, of the closeness between human and animal worlds. Leopard cousins, hieratic iguanas and a dog like a gazelle occupy the same active and emotional space as the humans encountered by the reader. In what has been described as break-through writing, Meeka Walsh writes in a celebratory way about her own body, and her narrators take from their womanly beings fierce and delicate imprints for lives lived with quiet but uncompromising passion.
`Meeka Walsh is working at the core of some (God
knows how) Sustained
Self that perceives All but is content to walk a tight
wire above all the
mundane stuff and to walk that wire with utter clarity
of vision, with that
precision of instinct and intelligence that we
associate with the most
astutely realized being. Meanwhile, through
utilization of a full range of
associations (mind, body, and soul) she summons in
full graphic vividness
that sensual landscape where the eye, the heart, the
hands and feet meet in
agreeable solace. Intricate intimacies. Sensationalism
she reserves for the
beautifully sculpted phrase, the crafted sentence, the
riveting detail, insights that shiver the flesh.
If you demand that your writer write like no one
else then Meeka Walsh is your kind of writer.'
- Leon Rooke
`It's uncanny how these stories and their characters sneak
up on you, stay with you, haunt you, for these are mostly
stories in which nothing happens. A woman stays in a hotel for two weeks
and gets small gifts on her dinner service from a chef she never sees;
a woman takes a bath in a tubrecently vacated by her travelling companion.
But there's magic at work. Walsh has done something to time. She
can stretch a description of a man casting a fishing line for a full page,
and you are hooked; the tension never lessens.'
- Rosemary Sullivan, Quill & Quire
`The Garden of Earthly Intimacies perfectly captures the
intangible. The best stories (the title story, `Mexican Island Quartet',
`Going Down') are like translations of sensuality, as if sand or butter
or seawater spoke a language not quite like ours. And it's through the
senses that her characters discover themselves, or find the power to rebel
against a variety of cruelties.'
- André Alexis, the Globe & Mail
`Walsh's language speaks of both the earthly and the otherworldly,
the mundane and the magical, and her characters' gestures, transcending
the ordinary, and rendered in sensual, elegant prose, are fresh, subtle,
and somehow perfect.'
- Canadian Literature
`A central theme of the book is the belief that knowing and interpreting
the world are private and nearly unsharable passions. What can be exchanged are words,
stories, music. And beneath the language and visual beauty of the text is a yearning
to tell smells. The olfactory sense, once so vital to our survival, is often evoked.'
- Michael Kenyon, the Malahat Review
Walsh is also a member of the Canadian Artist's and Producer's Professional Relations Tribunal for the Status of the Artist. The Garden of Earthly Intimacies is her first book of fiction.