‘This book is distilled magic. It’s a collection of short pieces, including observations of nature, meetings with people, many of them gardeners, mysterious incidents and other episodes from the author’s life.
He has the power to observe so closely that he becomes part of what he is observing. He writes with a simple beauty which is unsurpassed. The wonder, the pain and the joy of both the ordinary and the extraordinary shine out through these little stories and descriptions.
It’s a passionate book, revealing much about the author, the nooks and crannies of Britian he knows, and the people he has met there. He has the gift of seeing the remarkable in the ordinary people.
But it’s the descriptions of nature – of being in nature, of being part of nature – which are the best part of the book. Raindrops on a windowpane, weeds in an urban backyard, a bumblebee on a flower, the ancient woods of North somerset, all come alive as never before. I can honestly say I haven’t read a better nature writer.’ Patrick Whitefield in Permaculture Magazine
‘More familiar, yet simultaneously more startling, is Peter Alfred Please’s Holine…It is a random , chronologically scrambled collection of offbeat observations and stories from rural Britain. What comes through is Please’s fascination with rural scenes and wildlife, as well as the fringes of British alternative culture. From his life as a provincial journalist and later as an organic gardener, Please offers images of autumn glaes on Iona, of Tibetan refugees in the English countryside; and of cycling in the Kielder Forest…an attractive, eccentric and endearing anthology.’ Earth Matters, Friends of the Earth
‘The book arrived in the mail unsolicited…which puts one on one’s guard. I laid it to one side. Perhaps one day, I thought. Well, one day gets finally to happen some three years later. I’m leaving late for a train, and haven’t thought what to read. The journey proves shorter than I could ever have imagined.
Not easy to convey how a book, one of whose qualities is a diffidence of ambition, and whose pitch is so retering, could be such a remarkable achievement. Nor to make the case for readers, especially Resurgence readers, to favour themselves with a copy at once.
Holine; Bulletins fromn the Wayside is, on the face of it, nothing more than a ranble of extracts from a thirty-year store of journals – not chronological but set according to season and the author’s mood measure, telling in their juxtaposition and crosstalk; and this plotlessness seeming a deliberate step outside predictable time, made to serve an eddying and more edifying sequence. Even so, is this really enough to write home about?
Firstly there is the magical writing. All good writing shares with practised meditation that at-onement of mindfulness and awareness, of a degree of being present with a particular insight. But a rare gift with words coupled to a seer’s gift is required for this precise, binding magoic. The sensitive reader is charmed by the accuracy, sense focus and cadence of language into such a quickened here-and-now that he or she is able to breathe all the quivering asides that make our reveries perhaps the fullest register of our lives.
The magic here carries a charge that has a similar effect on me of as early Casteneda – that sudden way the skin creeps or the neck-hair lifts, as if the presence of a power-ally or the nearness of death had been drafted into the room. At the same time, the writing relates so directly to, and is so much the gift of its landscape, that it seems to me of the essence of an English vein of literature. As such it is part of an ingrained tradition, a current in the mainstream of our culture, our identity even, and a source of essential renewal.
On the back of this magic comes another. The author, this self-confessed pedestrian-cyclist, the persistently accident-prone seeker who clings to hope even when inextricably lost, somehow establishes himself as our own slightly dotty but sympathetic Everyman. He is able to achieve this because his palpable self-interest is unself-seeking, or rather, is purely Self-seeking. Again he shares something with a meditator of long practice, this ability to observe his own moods, his emotional maelstroms, his highs and letdowns, and even the stormy weather of his love-life, all with the same concern for detail, for the patina on the surface and the inner textures, that engage him and us in his view of nature. Because of this he is part of the world he describes, and his love for it is realized in its and our acceptance of him.
These wanderings in the byways and chance encounters are told to us with the remarkable outsider/insider authority of a seasoned supertramp. In his humour, and perhaps above all in his self-forgetting delight in the exceptional ordinariness of others, we feel Peter Please to be someone alive to his time. And that time is our own – ar at least it is if we’ve been partway alive to the backlanes, the dead-ends, and the rigours and emerging aspirations of the alternative last fifty years.’ John Moat, co-founder of the Arvon Foundation, writing in Resurgence Magazine
