All in all, this is the best book about rural New England life since Jane Brox’s Here and Nowhere Else. Its scope is narrow, but its reach is vast. Its short but wide-ranging essays seem like the dozens of jars of canned tomatoes Wormser and his wife put up each year to provide the base of their winter meals, each one carefully, thoughtfully, and lovingly prepared. The order in which they are taken off the shelves does not really matter, but it is evident that each is part of the same impulse of mind and heart and body, and each in return nourishes all three. As such, the book asks to be read slowly, savored, because, as Wormser says of the entire enterprise of living off-grid, ‘There was no sum. Only infinite entries.’

His ruminations on crafting poems and thoughtful considerations of the value of literature will be of great interest to readers and fellow writers. Wormser counters any comparisons to Thoreau, and, in fact, has a far greater sense of humor than the iconic backwoodsmen, but his endearing memoir about living simply, yet richly, in woods he clearly loves certainly does extend the tradition Thoreau exemplifies.

What separates this memoir from the often clichéd back-to-the-land life story is that the author’s choices are always seen through the lens of language, especially poetry. As he describes the characters who reside in his small community in Maine, the demands of keeping up with kerosene lamps and wild gardens, the dashed hopes for the community library lost to fire, the wear and tear of time, roads, wells, and woods-he never loses the context of literary history. Wormser’s authorial consciousness is permeated with Frost, Keats, Shelley, and the force of Romanticism-the individual’s journey toward and examination of what life ought to be in light of what is.

Intelligent and engaging, following no chronology, [The Road Washes Out in Spring] rambles and wanders its way in an almost Byronic fashion, slowly and modestly revealing the making of a poet.

In engaging and elegant prose, Baron Wormser writes about the challenges of intimacy-with the land, family, language and mind, and with the traditions of other seekers. This is a spiritual memoir that does what only the best of this genre can do: question and haunt, while evoking our own longings for such a deeply felt and imaginative life.