The Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece

The exquisite prose and erudition displayed in these essays by National Poetry Series Award-winning poet Hiestand ( Green with Witch Hazel Wood ) may awe some readers as she brilliantly portrays four very different, far-flung localities. Their geology, history, and people are animated by an artist's vision, a naturalist's curiosity and an intellectual disposition. Accompanied for most of her travels by another ``middle-aged bookish woman,'' Hiestand explores the former Mayan stronghold of Belize--an environmentalist's unspoiled paradise inhabited by a rich mixture of people who have descended mainly from slaves of the colonial past. The fog-shrouded, windswept, rainy Orkneys, with their monolithic cairns and circles assembled by Neolithic humans, offer a stark contrast to the idyllic, sunbathed islands of Greece ``saturated with myth.'' The reader will long remember Hiestand's chilling and masterful account of her meeting with a ``primal'' Everglades alligator. (Oct.)