In the company of light

In the Company of Light begins at the end of summer in Maine, when the swallows, harbor seals, and shore birds fly ahead of the "mind's ability to grasp them." Hay writes of the profound engagement of migration, and of the seasonal pull that has him restless to join "the great company of life on the planet." Hay's searching, visionary prose details a wealth of late-summer encounters: with a kingfisher providing "a blue opening into space" and with a weasel "made in order to chase its own life to the end of possibility." He returns at season's end to his Cape Cod home, to a landscape he has made his own for fifty years, where he discovers foxfire in the woodpile and the strange bioluminescence of the sunfish, which "carries its reflected light in the dark seas, like the mood between the clouds."