When Jon Gower, an inveterate romantic about islands, read an article in The Times about an island twelve miles off the coast of Maryland settled since 1607 by people from Wales and Cornwall, but threatened now by rising sea levels, he knew he had to go there. On the strength of a John Morgan award, he set sail for Smith - through books, along skyways, and over the waters of the Chesapeake Bay - and this beautifully written praise-poem-in-prose is the result. It places Jon Gower alongside the likes of Jan Morris and Jim Perrin among Wales's finest stylists in the English language.The island of Smith, about eight miles long and four miles wide, with only 900 of its 8,000 steadily sinking, marshy acres habitable, is an unashamed backwater, relatively unsullied by the clamour and consumerist greed of our 'Age of Extremes'. Populated by only a few hundred people, most of whom are descended from either the Evans or the Tyler families, the island has no bar, no supermarket, no cinema, no MacDonald's, no crime; it affords us a glimpse, Jon Gower argues, of how things might have been had not the great god Capital held sway in the wider world.The three focal points of island life are water, the Chesapeake blue crab, which is the foundation of their economy, and Methodism. The church both enshrines a strong work ethic (and there's no doubt that the islanders' working lives are harder than most) and underpins a richly sustaining sense of community. But this doesn't appear to be a Methodism of the (forgive the pun) 'crabbed' variety, for the watermen seem to enjoy a pantheistic relationship with their surroundings, seeing God in all aspects of nature's elemental abundance.

Being, according to a local poet, 'the greatest poets/who never wrote a line', the islanders are fortunate to find in Jon Gower a chronicler with finely tuned antennae for the poetry that is in both words and things - pompanos, loblollies, mudminnows, mummichogs - and a poet's exuberant facility with language to offer outward the wonders he discovers. Selected as one of the twelve titles in this year's 'Summer Reading' promotion, it's an ideal volume to tuck into your holiday suitcase. To travel to Smith in person would be great, but the experience of this book - whisper it - might even be better.