Unraveling Secrets and Shadows: A Riveting Dive into Betsy Cornwell’s Ring of Salt
Reading Ring of Salt felt like talking to an old friend on the phone — the kind of conversation where you both start finishing each other’s sentences because you’ve been there, you know. When Cornwell describes sitting in a room at COPE, listening to other survivors tell their stories, I was right there with her. I’ve sat in rooms like that. I’ve heard those stories. I’ve been one of those stories. The recognition was almost physical.
Ring of Salt is a profound meditation on place and on how landscape can hold us. The descriptions of Ireland are luminous, loaded with such specificity and tenderness I felt I could reach out and touch the stone walls of the knitting factory, taste the salt air on the shore, feel the silvery wet sand of An Trá Mhór beneath my feet. When Cornwell describes the wild strawberries in the yard of the old knitting factory, I was on the ground with her, staining my fingers red. When she looks out over the lake, I’m looking too, bathed in that particular quality of Irish light that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
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