Marla Miller | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Marla Miller | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture. By Robert Blair St. George. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xiv, 466 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-8078-2382-1. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8078-4688-0.)

The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House supports itself
And Cease to recollect
The Augur and the Carpenter.
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life
A past of Plank and Nail
And slowness—then the Scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul.

The historian and folklorist Robert Blair St. George shares much in common with the poet Emily Dickinson: both inhabit worlds of metaphor, metonym, and synecdoche; both are concerned with matters of embodiment; and both work in styles uniquely their own. Written in St. George's inimitable voice, Conversing by Signs is a tour de force examination of the multiple meanings embedded in corporeal things, as well as the means, or conversation, by which they are expressed. In other words, this is a book about the material world of early New England and the ideas—obvious and obscure, implicit, indirect, and, above all, thickly layered—attached to objects within it. . . .

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