"Wolf Solent" by John Cowper Powys reminds me why I started my academic life as an English major. I read my first Powys novel in the mid -1970's when I discovered his fascinating novel based upon Welsh hero Owen Glendower. In those years I was hungry for anything about Wales - land of my Grandmother - but there was little to be found. And now, 30-odd years later I discovered a worn copy of "Wolf Solent" in a discard bin.
It's language and imagery. It's a world that is no more. It's Nature nearly eclipsing an array of fascinating characters whose seemingly simple outward world hides the darkest primordial stirrings of Lenty Pond.
Let me share a scene with Wolf and his illicit lover Christie:
"The weight of the immense vaporous summer darkness covered them there like a waveless ocean. They floated there upon a cool, yielding darkness that had neither substance nor shape, a darkness full of a faint fragrance that was the sweetness neither of clover nor of poppies nor of corn nor of grass, but was rather the breath of the great terrrestrial orb itself, a dark interior, outflowing sweetness between vast-rocking waves of air, where firmament bent down to firmament, and space rose up to meet space."
