This Death by Drowning - Hardcover

Kloefkorn, William

3.94

31 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803227361 ISBN 13: 9780803227361

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 1997

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The first volume in William Kloefkorn's four-part memoir which, when completed, will cover the four elements: water, fire, earth, and air. This Death by Drowning is a memoir with a difference—an artfully assembled collection of reminiscences, each having something to do with water. The book's epigraph, from Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, proclaims, "I am haunted by waters." So—and in most rewarding ways—is William Kloefkorn. The first chapter recalls the time when, at age six, the author "came within one gulp of drowning" in a Kansas cow-pasture pond, only to be saved by his father. A later chapter recounts Kloefkorn's younger brother's near death by drowning a few years later; still another envisions the cycle of drought and torrential rains on his grandparents' Kansas farm. There are fanciful memories of the Loup and other Nebraska rivers, interlaced with Mark Twain's renderings of the Mississippi and John Neihardt's poetic descriptions of the Missouri. And there are stories of more recent times—a winter spent in a cabin on the Platte River, and an often amusing Caribbean cruise that Kloefkorn took with his wife. Throughout, Kloefkorn takes his memories for a walk, following each recollection into unexpected, fruitful byways. Along the way he pauses at larger themes—of nature, death, family, and renewal—that gradually gather irresistible force and authority.

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About the Author:

William Kloefkorn (1932–2011) was an emeritus professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University and Nebraska’s state poet. He is the author of many volumes of poetry, among them Burning the Hymnal; Going Out, Coming Back; and Swallowing the Soap, available in a Bison Books edition.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An elegant, moving little book from the current state poet of Nebraska that reflects the author's fascination and intense personal involvement with waters big and small, from farm ponds to the South Pacific. Kloefkorn (English/Nebraska Wesleyan Univ.) cites Loren Eisley's dictum, ``If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.'' The author finds magic in other liquids, too, ``chief among them cow's milk,'' but it is water--and the dangers it can pose--that is Kloefkorn's touchstone, both literary and actual. At the age of six, he fell into Harold Simpson's cow- pasture pond in south-central Kansas and nearly drowned. A few years later his brother, trying to sit behind the wheel of a car submerged in Ely's Sandpit, duplicated the near-fatal mishap. The author writes of his youthful wonder at the family's cistern; of watching his grandmother at a washtub in the backyard, ``washing her long white hair in rainwater''; of his and a paraplegic friend's baptism in Shannon's Creek, performed by a preacher whose sermons were, like ``Kansas waterways, neither deep nor wide.'' Kloefkorn notes another baptism that went awry, with the victim drowning, and wonders if it ``had been sufficiently and well-enough performed for it to have taken hold and thus last.'' Some of the waters he treads are larger, or of different form: He recalls learning of the hundreds drowned in the ``bespoiled water'' of Pearl Harbor; FDR taking the waters at Warm Springs, Ga.; Truman's calling the Hiroshima bomb ``a black rain of ruin''; the time he and a friend dropped an M-80 firecracker in the women's toilet at the Baptist church, bringing on a prodigious flood. He writes, also, of favorite rivers, especially Nebraska's Loup, a stream he has floated down every summer for 30 years. Water drenches these pages, written about in a style that both immerses and quenches. -- Copyright �1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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