Harvard Review, Book review of "Owls Head" by Rosamond Purcell

Owls Head by Rosamond Purcell, Quantuck Lane Press, 2003, $25.00 cloth, ISBN 0971454868.

Form imitates subject in this story of William Buckminster, a Maine scrapyard dealer, and the friendship he shares with the author, Rosamond Purcell, an internationally-acclaimed writer and photographer. Bits of buried treasure are well worth the digging out of the seemingly unrelated chapters that zig and zag the story along. "Infiltration" tells of the author's first sighting of the dealer's domain; "Rag and Bone Shop" is an index of some of the objects she finds ("head of a broom like an army brush cut"); "Transgression" describes her long-awaited entry into his home. Purcell's structure mirrors not only his random collection but also her mind's surprising leaps. We begin with a profile of this rural eccentric and his kingdom of decaying objects, but we hit pay dirt with an exploration of how Purcell pursues her tendency to "fall in love . . . with the way things look."

William Buckminster, now nearing eighty, presides over (and is in mortal danger of being buried by) eleven acres of stuff-two centuries' worth of family antiques, decaying books, mountains of copper, rotting doll heads, and desiccated miscellany. Purcell, a sculptor and photographer, as well as a collaborator with Stephen J. Gould on three books and a column about art and science, is enchanted by the siren song of these piles. Her photos and essays have long been known for their precise composition of decaying books and objects. She finds mysterious lessons in the messages created by termites' random erasure of certain words on a book's page, the juxtaposition of animal and human images, and the way her rotting assemblages evoke a story. When she sees Buckminster's rubbish heap, she has found her Holy Grail.

They meet in 1981 when a photography class she is teaching in Rockport, Maine, goes on the road in search of subjects. "On the road to Owl's Head lighthouse . . . we saw it . . . It was mysterious in its excess. It was as if a magnet had dragged several hotels, a waterfront, and a whole town up or down the coast to this spot." She keeps returning, sometimes with a friend or a tape recorder, to snatch up more hood ornaments, hat blocks, gas caps, and ancient golf balls. Over time, she mines the owner's history as well as his property. But she refrains from mere clinical labels to explain his obsessions, for she feels a kinship with him. The mutual affection and respect between this "city girl" and the quiet but highly-opinionated widower is made clear in the conversation they have in the chapter called "Transcription." After twenty years of one-way visits, Purcell finally shows Buckminster around her Boston studio, and he pronounces it "absolutely amazing."

Purcell writes in the first chapter: "It will take the length of this book to explain the ways in which this love manifests itself." The author's artistic vision began at a young age, perhaps as a reaction to an academic father who always addressed his children with the question "Where is your book?" When she showed him her termite-eaten book piece, he tried to extract factual meaning from the remaining text. She, on the other hand, had stuffed the holes with butterfly wings, inspired by the theme of regeneration inherent in three of the remaining words, pere et fils.
Purcell's prose is as precise as her vision. She addresses potentially heavy subjects like aesthetic theory with a lightness of style, and her synapse-hops of delight in intuitive connection are contagious. After meditating on a piece displaying "the nature of Cat," she begins with a porous stone cat. She eventually positions a worm-bored shell, a piece of worm-eaten bread from World War I, and a bit of accordion next to it. Why? "The differences between wood and stone, bread, shell, and cat melt away because they are now together as Things that have Holes."
At five by eight inches, the book is too small to do justice to the photo reproductions in the lengthy but important "Notes" section. Still, it is a must for found-object fetishists, connoisseurs of surreal roadside discoveries, and family humanists of all generations.

Marcia Deihl
Copyright Harvard Review, Volume 26