Memory's Keep

3/5 ( ratings)

"James Kibler makes no bones about it. Memory's Keep is an all-out, full-hearted, sentimental paean to the golden days that were, or might have been, or surely should have been. Anyone who likes the smell of newly turned April dirt, of green fields simmering in summer heat, of freshly planed walnut, will love every page of this fondly authored book." --Fred Chappell, author of I Am One of You Forever

"Kibler has developed a theme that has long defined both Southern history and literature: the deep, metaphysical connection between the Southern character and temperament and the natural world." --Walter Sullivan

" In James Everett Kibler we find a member of a quickly diminishing breed: the man of letters." --Randall K. Ivey in Southern Partisan

Written in the loose style of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Memory's Keep is a nostalgic and bittersweet flashback, revealing the formative experiences of Trig Trigsely, the unforgettable curmudgeon at the center of Walking Toward Home, Kibler's first novel in his Clay Bank County trilogy . Kibler is known for his lyrical and poignant tales of Southern agrarianism and his critical examinations of the modern world. Memory's Keep explores these themes in the story of Mister Pink Suber, whose five children have moved away after the death of his wife. Alone, he goes on tending his land and livestock while mentoring his young neighbor and friend, Trig Trigsely, in the ways of farming and life. It is his deep love for the land and the sensibilities of Celtic imagination that inform us in Kibler's writing, gently and accurately revealing the Agragrian vision.