Barbara Grenfell Fairhead

A generous portrait of an artist at the height of her powers of perception. In these poems, sketches and song lyrics, crafted over a lifetime, we come to share in the adventure of stepping out of what Grenfell Fairhead calls the "house of orthodoxy." What binds these pieces together is her exuberance, and the sense that we are always at the beginning. Again and again, one feels a sense of things just beyond the range of the senses, waiting for us to catch up with them. In each landscape she describes, one feels her sensibility in sympathy with it, finding a place in it. As she remembers and argues with herself, mourns and celebrates, we find ourselves accompanying her on this voyage of discovery with our own full attention.

At the close of the violent twentieth century, Octavia Chavez is an artist beset by contradictions. Repelled by human cruelty, and sensing the impending extinction of wilderness, she nevertheless wants to put something into the world that inspires awe and wonder rather than horror and argument. And it turns out that, in the face of such a fierce challenge, the intellect is not much help at all. As Octavia discovers, "you cannot escape the dark work of staring into your own soul." Her only guides in this enterprise are a white wolf that no one else can see, and her faithful but exasperating friend Raho, who keeps challenging her to answer an impossible question: "What is the face of the coming guest?" Torn between her rage and her longing for emptiness, Octavia will have to brave the outer limits of her own endurance in order to find expression, and to reach a place of stillness in the midst of loss and uncertainty. In this, the third book in her New Mexico trilogy, Grenfell Fairhead turns inward. She challenges us to follow Octavia on her perilous journey of self-discovery, and also challenges us to confront the pressing difficulties of our own time with compassionate but fierce attention. Includes Reading Guide

Octavia Chavez, eighteen and fiercely passionate, has spent her life listening to the remote music of the stars, which only she seems to hear. She has a forbidden love of which she dares not speak, and a longing for wild, empty places. Her one true friend is a sanguine, seventy-seven-year-old wood-carver, Alejandro Jaramillo. Alejandro has been carving angels ever since he was summoned to do so at the age of ten. These two unlikely friends share one thing: a sense of having been called to something that lifts them towards an experience of the sacred. But when Octavia is involved in a life-threatening accident, and Alejandro begins to have dreams in which thousands of angels fall away from him into a bottomless abyss, they are both forced to question everything they have come to assume about themselves and their place in the world. So begins a voyage of discovery on which silence and dark music, new love and ancient landscapes will test their resolve to inhabit their own, inimitable lives. In prose that is both refreshingly muscular and hauntingly lyrical, Grenfell Fairhead invites us to examine what it means to grow up and truly belong, but also―even more crucially―what it could mean to grow down into one's own center, learning the slow, fierce discipline of paying attention to each fleeting moment.