![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/above-waterfall-ron-rash.jpg\" "\\"above-waterfall-ron-rash\\"")
<\/a>In his latest novel, Ron Rash once again proves his mastery of all things mountain and North Carolina. Throughout these pages, the curve of a mountain road, the fog of a morning, a field of black-eyed susans, all life of a life in the mountains, flow across the pages like paint on a canvas. No one does it better. Yet the author brings to his picture something more than just depiction. He puts into his story what isn\u2019t there any more, what is disappearing before our eyes, what the sheriff here calls \u201c\u2026when the world you knew had up and vanished, and you needed to find something to bring that world back, and you weren\u2019t sure that you could.\u201d\u00a0 Loss, in other words, what has been lost and replaced by meth labs in trailer parks, resorts where fishing ponds once sat, and pawn shops thriving on stolen goods. That\u2019s the mountain life Rash wrangles onto these pages.<\/p>\nThe sheriff has suffered as much loss as anyone \u2014 the artistic life he could have led, the woman he could have lived that life with, all behind him now, just three weeks before he retires. His \u201caccomplice\u201d Becky, the local park ranger, carries even more sorrow behind her. When fish are poisoned ABOVE THE WATERFALL, the two of them team up to prove that Gerald, the codger who most keeps the old ways alive here, didn\u2019t do it. As they try to solve the larger mystery, the smaller mysteries of their lives unfold.<\/p>\n
The sheriff owes a debt that he doles out in bits and pieces in the narrative; Becky copes daily with the killer who terrorized her kindergarten, and then the killer she lived with in her 20s. To assuage her pain, she took to the woods with only the books of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and immersed herself in his alliterative poetic mode.<\/p>\n
In possibly the most magical passages Rash has ever produced, she heads into nature to collect herself, where she shifts into language suffused with the poetic style of Hopkins, changing sometimes in mid-sentence into the calming comfort of poetry created in that moment: \u201cCaught on an angelica tree, a black snake\u2019s cast-off stocking;\u201d \u201ca world become\u00a0where wind and water\u00a0pass past\u00a0unheard;\u201d and \u201c\u2026after the morning in the school basement, word and wonder and world could be one.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, Rash not only manifests poetry in Hopkins\u2019 style, he does it with the tongue of a character coming to terms with her trauma. Great writing, as well as poetry as good as any that graces paper between covers anywhere.<\/p>\n
With the help of a cell phone he mentions in the first three pages (it doesn\u2019t show up again for about 200 pages), the sheriff solves the mystery of the poisoned fish. He also resolves the incident of the hay baler he\u00a0mentions in those first pages,\u00a0the smaller mystery in the plot but so much larger in his life. He heads off to retirement with a serious cash reduction and probably with Becky, who finishes the book with a poem of resolution, both for her and the reader.<\/p>\n
No mystery here: Ron Rash is one of our best writers,\u00a0in or out of the mountains.<\/p>\n
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