The songs and poems of 2007 Texas Poet Laureate Steven Fromholz tell of a life that began with ""bikes and trikes and kites and trees"" and has progressed through fatherhood and many days and nights spent on the road.Fromholz's poetry and lyrics evoke the western landscape, capture memories of the past and plans for the future, and plumb the depths and heights of feeling engendered by life as a touring musician. Despite a stroke, which felled him for a time, Fromholz still acts a whitewater guide on the Rio Grande, still performs, and still writes the poems that caused the State Legislature to name him Poet Laureate of Texas for 2007.

A mature poet, Larry Thomas has an extraordinary gift which has evolved through decades at his craft. Thomas explores the natural world of Texas - its animal icons like the Hereford or hawk or rattlesnake, the larger-than-life geography, which is the stuff out of which legends are made.Thomas captures the spirit of place within larger truths that ""travel well,"" as editor Billy Bob Hill explains in his introduction. Hill also takes careful note of the poet's deft alliteration and just-right compression of language as he urges readers to enjoy Thomas' poems for their Texas elements but also the worldly art therein.

Designed to enhance high school students' appreciation of the rich variety of Texas poetry, ""A Students' Treasury of Texas Poetry"" contains poems from the earliest beginnings of Texas, including work by Sam Houston and Mirabeau B. Lamar, to the work of contemporary poets like Naomi Shihab Nye, Larry McMurtry, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Jas. Mardis, and Carmen Tafolla. Hill groups the poems in categories, setting out the history of Texas from pre-history in poems like Larry D. Thomas' ""Caddoan Indian Mound"" or Alan Birkelbach's ""Coronado Points,"" to a chronicle of Texas counties in such poems as ""Haiku: Hands shading my eyes,"" by Michael Moore, or ""The Poet Gets Drowsy on the Road,"" by Frederick Turner. Texas poets examine the variety of family life in poems such as Red Steagall's ""The Memories in Grandmother's Trunk,"" ""Mi Tia Sofia,"" by Carmen Tafolla, or ""Growing Up near Escondido Canyon,"" by Walt McDonald. Even the weather and Texas' varied creatures are fodder for the poet's speculation, and Hill includes ""Good-bye Summer,"" by Jas. Mardis, and ""Summer Begins Outside Dalhart, Texas,"" by Mary Vanek, as well as ""Mr. Bloomer's Birds,"" by William D. Barney, and ""A Mockingbird,"" by Boyce House. The final chapter features attempts by poets to define the mysterious state that is Texas and includes, among others, ""litany: blood in the soil/texas (an excerpt),"" by Sharon Bridforth, and ""Our Texas Economy,"" by Chuck Taylor.

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An anthology which further explores the wonders of the human condition through traditional themes of love, sex, death and acne. Modernity and the vagaries of communication and the odd bit of nonsense also feature in this entertaining tome.

Texas in Poetry can be read straight through as a commentary on life in the Lone Star State. Or it can be read a poem or author at a time. But if read straight through from "I'll Take Texas" to "No Quittin' Sense" the whole Texas experience as seen by more than a hundred poets cannot fail to make an impact on the reader.

Editor Billy Bob Hill includes such poets as Mirabeau B. Lamar, a Texas president and poetaster from the days of the Republic; Berta Harte Nance, author of the centennial poem that begins "Other states were carved or born/But Texas grew from hide and horn"--lines that furnished at least one book title and occasioned a number of parodies. And, of course, one poem about Texas that is magnificent in its awfulness, "Laska, " with memorable lines like "Scratches don't count/In Texas down by the Rio Grande."

But most of the poems in this large, handsome volume are much superior to the representative early poems included. All the well-known poets in the state are included -- riters like Walter McDonald, Betsy Colquitt, and Vassar Miller -- as well as newer writers. Nor has the editor failed to offer a generous sampling of the state's best minority voices -- Carmen Tafolla, Rolando Hinojosa, Lorenzo Thomas, Jas. Mardis, Ray Gonzalez, and Teresa Paloma Acosta.

The volume is divided into sections with titles suggested by well-known books by Texas authors. Some of the sections are "I'll Take Texas" (from Mary Lasswell's book); "Faces of Blood Kindred" (William Goyen's original title); "This Stubborn Soil" (from the first volume of William A. Owens's autobiography); and, from A. C. Greene's memoir about West Texas, "A Personal Country."

Texas in Poetry is a revised andupdated edition of Hill's popular and definitive Texas in Poetry: A 150-Year Anthology. In this volume, as in the previous edition, Hill presents a selection of representative Texas poems from the early days of the colony to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Included in the volume are some bad but famous old-time poems, but most of the selections compare favorably with the best poetry being written today.