Beautiful Swimmers

William W. Warner died last year and is often the case I come upon these works after it's too late to ever ask the author themselves. Beautiful Swimmers has been in print continually since 1976, and rightly so. He wrote one other work abotu the sea Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman which was very similar to Beautiful Swimmers but with a different region of fishermen. He also published a collection of short stories that was quite good and strangely a dull as dry oatmeal treatise on Catholicism.

The strength of Warners work is in it's clean prose. This passage could have been reams longer detailing the disappointment, the emptiness or the dead grasses surrounding the square patch of bate earth. Instead Warner says everything by saying very little.

"Reaching Wenona, I was surprised to find an empty lot where Corbin's trailer home had formerly stood. Only a few cinder blocks of the foundation, a broken child's tricycle and some rusty crab pots remained."