Reading time: Just over 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of metaphors and similes from Richard Wagamese.
My friend Ellen recommended to me the 2009 book Ragged Company by Ojibway author Richard Wagamese (pictured above). This tale of a group of homeless people who win a $13.5 million lottery ticket — but can’t claim it because they don’t have proper ID — explores poverty, luck, spirituality and ideas of “home” with thoughtful, metaphorical writing.
This book, in turn, recently caused me to pick up another Wagamese tale, Medicine Walk (2014.) While I didn’t like the story quite as much — this one focuses on a young man spending time with his estranged father — I found the writing equally rich and evocative. Here are some of the similes and metaphors Wagamese used that caught my eye:
- He could see the moon through the slats of the barn when he woke. It was early morning and it was in its descent but it hung in the sky like a glacier pouring down light with the sheen of melting ice.
- It was the war that brought him to the world. He was eleven when his father went to fight it and he found that suddent absence jarring, like a tooth that falls out when you chew. It could sit in your palm and be seen as a tooth but its place was gone and there was only a hole.
- After the rain the land was a gumbo of smells. Pitch and bog, the tang of spruce, and the dank, rancid smell of wet bear tracing the weave of the creek to his left.
- When the old man straightened and took a step down the sidewalk the kids stood there and stared at the house. It seemed to sag like it was tired, as though it had borne weight for far too long and needed to slump to the ground.
- The light across the horizon was a wide flush of pink and magenta beneath the banked tier of cloud and the lowering sun threw shards of light upward so that the sky seemed curtained.
Isn’t that beautiful writing?