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. . . Sufficient light . . . she turned the manuscript’s pages. The colors were subdued, naturally, and they had a transparency they had not possessed in daylight, the transparency of a rainbow.

They manifested that clear, shining quality, and it was as if she were seeing them through a medium that, like space, had its own transparency. And dimension. Why had this three-dimensional feature not caught her attention earlier? Each illumination seemed to stand out rainbowlike from the parchment, and she could not gauge its distance from either the page or herself. Within each illumination, too, three dimensions danced. Yes, she could almost see movement in the illumination of the tree in the garden, as though a wind had stirred the leaves and grass. And hadn’t that bird, the one near the top of the tree, been more deeply hidden? . . .

. . . She felt on the back of her neck the shivery, mothlike brush that told her she was uneasy. It was as if the whole time she had been examining the book, someone had stood not five feet away reading her.

For both Hannah Wentworth, a bookshop owner in a small New England town, and her daughter Julia, a student eagerly undertaking an environmental internship in Hawaii, the guardianship of an unusual Ethiopian illuminated manuscript brings about an awakening, a questioning of everyday choices; the manuscript becomes the start of a journey that leads them into dangerous territory extending beyond physical boundaries. Daughters in the Field is a novel exploring the light and the dark forces contending for its characters' hearts and lives.

Daughters in the Field

Carved Cherubim and Palm Trees : Poems

Something Rare

While other trees are motionless

coconut palms still sway

as if they were underwater.

Surely no element as thin as air,

as common as simple happiness

supports them—

it must be something rare.

When the trade winds blow

you almost see what it is

but the coconut palms are busy

being so many wonderful things

like quick-change artists

yet all at once

they are waterspouts

and long-stemmed tornados

and open orbits of leaves

and green suns revolving their swords.

It’s just as you feel overwhelmed

that they sweep low to tell you

they aren’t really wizards

with spells to dizzy the world;

they don’t want to be stars

with poems that darken,

metallic flowers fused to a sky

which won’t bend or descend.

They are what all of us are in flashes,

when we are wind-blown:

lives catching fire from words

not our own.