In the Morning: Reflections from First Light by Philip Lee Williams

"When morning gilds the skies," as the old hymn begins, author Philip Lee Williams is awake on Wildcat Ridge in North Georgia observing the scents, sights and nuances of the break of day with the eyes of a science writer and a poet.

In his new book In the Morning: Reflections from First Light, Williams notes that for all of the poetic, symbolic and pragmatic power of morning, scarcely anyone has written a book about it. Williams, recently honored with the 2004 Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction for his novel A Distant Flame, has always brought a lyrical craftsmanship to his fiction. We find those lyrics here where hawks soar, owls call, and deer watch.

His writing style and his long-time personal explorations of the natural world create, through the essays in this book, a pure celebration of dawn that both inspires and informs. In that light, he is writing in the tradition of Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac, Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and David Rains Wallace in The Klamath Knot. Williams, like Leopold, Dillard and Wallace, knows how to make facts sing.

"I think I'm being honest," he writes, "when I say that I don't go toward the natural world looking for poetry or spirituality. Somehow, though, the world of these steep hills, these exposed boulders, of Wildcat Creek, takes me inward, and I am helpless to prevent it."

Williams explores the first three senses of morning, seeing, hearing and the "aroma of dawn" in ways only a well-practiced observer could ever know. We learn in his essay "First Things," that the word English word for "morning" appeared as "morewening" in 1250 and found its modern spelling 80 years later. In "The Morning of a New World," we learn that while the world "morning" appears in the Bible 214 times, only 17 of these occurrences are in the New Testament. We learn more as we read about the relationship of morning lovers and circadian rhythms, the arrogance of local red-tailed hawks, and the history of an old ghost town along the Oconee River named Scull Shoals.

For all that we learn in this gentle book, we do not come here so much for the facts as for the walk through the mornings of Wildcat Ridge. Perhaps, from afar, we will understand why Williams can say that in the fifteen years he's lived on that ridge, "I have had epiphanies in the pre-dawn, intimations of solitary happiness, which on some days I may call God."

In the Morning: Reflections from First Light
Philip Lee Williams
Hardcover, 144 pages, $23.00
Mercer University Press, 2006