If only humans disappeared

Four years after their first amorous idyll on Brokeback Mountain, doomed cowboy lovers Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist hook up again in small town Riverton. Their reunion is passionate, desperate.
Jack, aspiring rodeo rider, wants that they should ditch their families and set up ranch together, hang society. Stoic Ennis knows better the penalties of defying convention.To him are given the lines that define his world: "I'm stuck with what I got..If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it."
This is Marlboro country upturned, to reveal the myth of macho autonomy undercut by the brutal realities of a rural economy and small communities.
Where desire's defeat is inevitable, triumphing momentarily only on the elusive Eden of Brokeback Mountain. Film-maker Ang Lee's remarkable rendering of Annie Proulx's prize-winning short story has brought long overdue attention to one of America's finest writers of the rural landscape.
Much of the pleasure of Proulx's short stories lies in the evocation of a specific place���desolate, magnificent Wyoming���and its inhabitants.
But the best of them transcends the particular, like Brokeback, which, as the New Yorker noted, is neither about gays or cowboys but something more universal: love under siege.
It is more often nature and the lives of those closest to it that are under siege by civilisation in Proulx's Wyoming short-story collections, Close Range and Bad Dirt, and her Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Shipping News, set in coastal Newfoundland.
Her preoccupation with the natural landscape ("it would be marvellous if human beings disappeared") follows an American literary tradition that starts with Thoreau. But Proulx is no airy-fairy transcendentalist.
She is as keenly aware of nature's savagery as its redemptive beauty, while her concern with struggling rural communities, whether it is "hardworking transients, tough as nails and restless" or small landholders turfed out by "newly-moneyed suitcase ranchers...ex-California real estate agents, fabulous doctors, retired cola executives", has drawn comparisons with Steinbeck and Faulkner.
Hers is a lyricism of detail, meticulously researched depictions of work���be it knife grinding or the sailor's art of tying knots���and precise descriptions, picking words like pebbles.
Every now and then, a line or image seizes you by the neck: two wary people meeting for the first time eye each other "as though looking for toeholds" and in the fraught conversation of thwarted lovers, years of things unsaid rise around them "like vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter".
Bad Dirt, the more recent collection, is more whimsical. One story is told from a badger's perspective, another is about a tea-kettle that grants wishes like Aladdin's lamp. But the landscape is never far away, and always alive.
In What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?, a rancher fights a losing battle to sustain his farm, defeated not just by his own short-sightedness and the changing economy but by the land itself, which "wanted to go to sand dunes and rattle snakes, wanted to scrape off its human ticks".