Book Review: \u3ci\u3eWild Stone Heart: An Apprentice in the Fields\u3c/i\u3e by Sharon Butala

In the aftermath of September 11th, the recommendation of a book by what the Toronto Star called one of this country\u27s true visionaries may seem an ill-afforded luxury. Butala\u27s odyssey may become all the more suspect when we realize that her book centers on walking in a field in southwest Saskatchewan. How might such a book address the smell of burning metal and flesh? Actually, quite well. Wild Stone Heart asks us to descend into an underworld of both grief and possibility which works in, with, and under the land upon which Butala traverses. She envisions layers of presence where the present is infused by the past, the material world cracked and split narrowly” by the world of myth. Dualities of the ideal and mundane, then and now, natural and human, holy and humus are bridged into a holistic epistemology celebrating both connection and difference