From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place

``I have never really belonged to an American landscape,'' declares poet and essayist Tall ( The Island of the White Cow: Memories of an Irish Island ) at the outset of this well-observed meditation on the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, to which she moved in 1982. Shifting between personal observations and literary/historical reflections, she describes her attachment to a place both beguiling and benighted. ``Geneva has many of the griefs of a city . . . but none of the advantages,'' she laments, but as she ruminates on the importance of a home, she finds comfort in the natural beauty around her. Though Tall is a fluent guide, her memoir suffers from a certain bloodlessness: her search for home seems mainly a mental construct, with a paucity of human characters. In the end, when she reports how her family, seeking a ``more lively, responsive human community,'' has moved to the nearby college town of Ithaca, we sense what she has left out. (May)