|
Amazon
WHEN THE SONG LEFT THE SEA
Kevin Hull
Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: TWILIGHT BOOKS
ISBN-10: 160702862X
Type: Fiction
Pages: 207
Copyright: December 2011
ISBN-13: 9781607028628
A story of loss, love and redemption.
Our main character, Hector Martin, nearing sixty, watches the great Gray whale’s ancient migratory patterns, drinking and brooding on an unsatisfactory life, while contemplating his own deep-seated need for a sense of home, leaving his young son’s raising to his sister, a complex and lonely surrogate mother. As Hector (both father and son abandoned by a young, wild and troubled ‘wife’) wanders the beaches and examines what seems to be an illusory, nearly uninhabited life, we come to the story with a tenderness as honest as a father’s “I love you” or a sad, neglected child’s first troubling questions. We learn that while most flee grief, others transform it. And the great Gray whale continues its nomadic song, ever-faithful in the currents of the deep. We learn that redemption often comes in the most unexpected ways, and this solitary man, fallen from grace, must at last face his demons: Will he choose life or death? In this powerful tale of loss, renewal and hope, our characters are on a collision course towards the unknown, each left to find the magic of life on the rim of failure, mystery, and inconceivable love.
I am deeply moved by your work. In this world of mediocrity
and published work that embarrasses, I was amazed to realize
that I had never read you before.
Amy Small-McKinney, Writer & Poet
Kevin Hull is an award-winning, internationally published poet and writer, whose work has been anthologized and featured. He is the former editor of WHITE HERON LITERARY REVIEW. Although he has lived in many places across the country, he lived and worked in Morro Bay for the majority of his adult life This is his first novel.
This is more or less the back cover
ISBN : 978-1-60702-862-8
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Buddha smiled and said:
A poet must pull from Unreality
the Reality of a living Song
In his dream he was walking along the shoreline, gazing out to sea with a peculiar feeling of prescience.
A pulse of great Gray whales was moving south and could be seen far out on the horizon. They would soon be in the warm waters of Mexico, where they would breed and birth before retracing their mammoth journey north to their feeding grounds int he Bering Sea.
He saw her from a distance, gathering shells. The vast ocean was washing its dead. Walking toward her, he too stopped occasionally, enticed by an attractive shard from the depths. Some of these he put in his pocket; others he tossed back upon the beach. The woman was looking out at the darkening sea; perhaps towards Okinawa or the mountains of China. Perhaps into the ominous darkness.
Perhaps she imagined nothing farther than the flashing crest of the angry waves. It was a wild sea, gray and foreboding, a storm building in the west and growing quickly, enveloping them with wind and driven pockets of rain. Time had accomplished nothing. It was the old story, always the same beginning, this feeling of self and no self, this inceasing hunger, this scar of existence.
"Beautiful weather, isn't it?" he laughed, "if you like dark chaos, that is."
She looked him in the face with an expression of curious detachment. He could have been a shadow sweeping across the sand. But as he remained silent and motionless, the simple question he had asked began to fill the air with unexpected significance. Her expression changed; a look of almost of embarrassment, flushed, revealed a thin and freckled creases of her face.
"Yes, it is," she consurred and nodded politely, looking out to sea.
"You're not from here?" he said, with certainty.
"O no!" she laughed softly. "How about you?" He shifted his feet in the sand, smiled, and bent down to capture a tiny sliver of a shell he saw spinning towards the sea. She noticed the quickness with which he moved.
"This, I suppose, is home base," he said evasively. "I've been around here, on and off, for awhile." He rose and turned to face her. "Where, then, if I may ask, are you from? I thought I detected a slight southern lilt in your voice" and he handed her the piece of shell. It shone like liquid pearl, a purple and golden was flowing with neither matrix or design. She received it in silence.
|
