Country Churchyards

Rating:
Summary: LOVE THIS BOOK!
Review: Did I say I love this book enough? <G> Eudora Welty, the great Mississippi writer took these photographs many years ago. They cover churches and cemeteries around the Jackson area. Some of these places I know and have in my own collection of photos. Haunting places. There is much to be said of Welty's work with the camera. She has a great eye for detail, for light, and for mood. She has captured a period that is long gone. She loves angels. There are few commentaries because this is a book, not about words, but about churches, tombstones, and their lasting message. A great addition to both collectors of tombstone art and Eudora Welty's work. A classic. Buy it while you can. It will be a collectible one day.

Rating:
Summary: LOVE THIS BOOK!
Review: Did I say I love this book enough? Eudora Welty, the great Mississippi writer took these photographs many years ago. They cover churches and cemeteries around the Jackson area. Some of these places I know and have in my own collection of photos. Haunting places. There is much to be said of Welty's work with the camera. She has a great eye for detail, for light, and for mood. She has captured a period that is long gone. She loves angels. There are few commentaries because this is a book, not about words, but about churches, tombstones, and their lasting message. A great addition to both collectors of tombstone art and Eudora Welty's work. A classic. Buy it while you can. It will be a collectible one day.

Rating:
Summary: More photographs from a writer's eye
Review: Those who cherish Eudora Welty's earlier collection of photographs (_One Time, One Place_) need no urging from me to sample this new jewel box of images from a Mississippi past. Like the earlier collection, these black-and-white photographs document the rural South of the 1930's and 1940's when Welty worked as a photographer for the WPA. As its title suggests, this book offers a tighter focus: on the burying-places of the rich and poor, the black and the white. Here be angels of all sorts, urns and chapels, sheep and dogs, children who seem but to sleep in masks of marble. Those who know Welty's keen gift for description will see how her eye for detail, setting and atmosphere was trained up in her early photographic work. Each image seems surrounded by the rich and generous spirit through which Welty sees the world and those who toil in it.

The photographs are preceded by an account of a conversation with Miss Welty (as we Southern men and women of letters have learned to always refer to her) and interspersed with excerpts from the novels. Also a joy is the introduction by fellow Mississipian Elizabeth Spencer, who places these images in the landscape of Welty's fiction, as expressions of "Eudora Welty's vision of death as a part of life." Spencer continues, "It must find its ceremony within family and community, and its symbols, beautifully displayed here, arise out of the beliefs and feelings of shared love."

To spend time with this book is to walk among the mossy trees, rest among the cool white monuments, and feel the pull of that greater community which surrounds us. It gives further evidence why Miss Welty is one of our great national treasures. But I leave the last word to her, in this excerpt from _The Optimist's Daughter_: "The top of the hill ahead was crowded with winged angels and life-sized effigies of bygone citizens in old-fashioned dress, standing as if by count among the columns and shafts and conifers like a familiar set of passengers collected on deck of a ship, on which they all knew each other -- bona-fide members of a small local excursion, embarked on a voyage that is always returning in dreams."

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