WOMAN ALONE: A Farmhouse Journal <i> by Carol Burdick (Paul S. Eriksson, Publisher, 208 Battell Building, Middlebury, Vt. 05753: $17.95; 209 pp.) </i>

For a year, Carol Burdick spent her nights and weekends at an old New England farmhouse that her parents had restored; there the author sought solitude, reflection, and some justification for her yearning to be a writer. As her month-by-month entries reveal, it was a turbulent year for someone who was “still not terribly well put back together.” Burdick’s retreat followed her husband’s walking out on her and a further abandonment in the death of her father (whom she watched “gradually becoming an object”), as well as smaller, no less significant losses, such as the growing independence of her son and daughter. She records the seasons’ passings and her emotional highs and lows with equal fervor; as is true for all practiced diarists, she does not write each day, but tries to observe ordinary events and surroundings with a fresh eye and a listening heart.

Burdick’s notably visceral entries command attention and compel the reader’s deepest sympathies. This is an honest effort to celebrate the simple, even the trivial, and a heartfelt evocation of the need to find “a room of one’s own” in an overwhelming and vast world. “Woman Alone” is Burdick’s search for an autonomous self, and her attempts at self-creation--”to locate myself in time and place”--without succumbing to outbreaks of desolation and disenfranchisement.

Readers share Burdick’s mood swings and her buoyant immersion in the natural world of the farm. She fails, however, to reach either the universality or the confessional revelation of the better-known nature writers and diarists. Her words, never too ennobling or elevating, nonetheless tremble with the moral force of someone risking much in her gentle bid for readers’ mercy, where she seeks refuge, salvation and connection.