Finding Higher Ground: A Life of Travels

Catharine Savage Brosman explores the places of her own life in the essays in Finding Higher Ground. The tour, for the reader, is one of delight and wonder. Brosman's places range from the West Texas desert of her girlhood to a chilly flat in the North of England, from the flooded streets of New Orleans to the sublimities of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Even as her meditations reflect on her connections to these places and the ways they have shaped her life, at the same time they also examine the broader connections between individual and community, culture and society, experience and memory. Her voice is unique--combining a poet's sensitivity to nuances of setting and behavior with salty good sense, passionate engagement in the world of letters, sly wit, and a rugged independence of character inherited from generations of her Western ancestors.