Americana, mostly west and southwest, original and traditional poetic forms, serious to whimsical

Americana, mostly west and southwest, original and traditional poetic forms, serious to whimsical

"Internal Landscape, External Reality" The author's adventures afield are told within the framework of personal essays or stories that intertwine action, feeling, and thought. He describes what it means to be an outdoorsman of ordinary means, but one with an extraordinary curiosity about why we do what we do in the pursuit of game and fish. He questions tradition, with logic and a wry humor at times, and pokes fun at fads, rationalization, and sometimes, himself. Hunting and fishing provide excuse for delightful equipment too, rods and guns and their many accessories, all special for the adventures they make possible and share. Overall the outdoors is treated as a special place, full of wonderful creatures, fine scenery, and the potential for modest adventures, alone or shared with companions, both human or animal. The impulse to examine a life enriched and defined by the time spent in the outdoors in the pursuit of game and fish, and indoors in the examination of its spoken and unspoken traditions provides the environment.

In "Leaving Lakehouse" the author tells his own story from the perspective of one who sees the beauty in life without rose colored glasses, and also its limitations-including his own-face to face, without benefit of palliative myth. It is Everyman's story without Everyman's assurances, human mortality always an echo in 'Leaving," but treated as a fact of the human condition not to be denied as part of the fabric of an individual history. 'Lakehouse" becomes the focus for describing and accepting one's place in reality, which is described with a recurring wry irony, and with occasional spurts of indignation, humor, and literary allusion.

The author suggests that we might accept our place in nature as do other natural creatures: The birds' comings and goings suggest private, almost silent, seemingly uncomplicated lives we are foreign to, an endless epic with no story to tell, time measured by quietly moving wings of a dozen lovely mourning doves passing.

"Home" is the story of growing and growing up in a place where human beings made a hard land home, a place of profound trust and security, space, and responsibility. It celebrates family, the family of father and mother, the extended family of uncles and aunts and grandparents, the larger family of community, molded by the land and weather and time, yet never reduced by necessity into confusing making a living with making a life. "Home" is about living in an agrarian world of the 30's and 40's, with all the usual uncertainties connected with crops and animal husbandry, and all the certainties of decent persons sharing a common endeavor, living close to the land and animals and each other. The story is related quietly, respectfully, with no pretense of romantic or narrative embellishment.

A common denominator is hard, physical labor handled with the competence and grace of necessity and opportunity rather than the demands of hardship--handled so well that good times and leisure seem part of a seamless whole, no one, nothing, left out, all things part of the scheme, so that no other environment ever seems so complete and secure, no other place so reliable as to be called home.

These poems, in traditional and modern forms using mostly country metaphors, celebrate human and animal residents of the western prairie, preserving the strong voices and matter-of-fact, often ironic, view of existence there; at the same time they deal with universal themes such as nostalgia, isolation, death, and mature love. Life's essential ambivalence is a constant and is presented with realism and occasional wry humor. The author includes an Afterward which examines the idea of poems in general and gives hints for reading his own.