Ahsahta Press

Sycamore • Oriole

Ken McCullough — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:51:31 PST

McCullough’s poems are like songs—long, roving songs that wander the bitter cold slope of the eastern Rockies from the Crazies into the Wyoming Badlands. As Ed Folsom says in his introduction to the book, “McCollough’s dialect of ease and informality (working to de-form and re-form and in-form the shape of the poem)...neatly captures a cleaning out of a part of the self, turning the self lean, emptying the vowels, ridding the self of selfishness, a ritual of purgation.” From this ritual, McCullough’s work rises, easily, effortlessly, exploring everything from the smallest particle of dust to the self to the whole momentum of humanity.

Kingdom of Lost Waters

Sonya Hess — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:51:30 PST

Hess’s strategies for revelation vary from the Roethkean contemplation of “little” events, to assuming the myths of native Americans, to direct contemporary narrative. Many of these poems read like meditations, where little presupposition is imposed upon landscapes or objects. Hess’s careful imagery allows the grasshopper, the cloud, and even the artist Rubens to speak to the reader. The power of the Western landscape and the human heart coalesce in Hess’s verse.

Little-Dog-Of-Iron

Philip St. Clair — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:01:38 PST

An especially apt title for St. Clair’s 1985 collection of poems, Little-Dog-of-Iron has thrived during its sixteen years in print. The poems follow the trickster Coyote as St. Clair creates him in both modern and ancient myth, with occasional historical interludes based on fact, in which “Coyote Addresses His Brothers the Wolves and the Foxes.” St. Clair, like Coyote, mixes the horrific with the humorous unpredictably, for as Howard McCord writes in his introduction to the poems, “laughter and tears are brothers.” A somber “Coyote with the Shadow People” therefore finds itself with “Coyote Horny” and “Coyote in Law School.” The end result stands alongside the work of Sherman Alexie and James Welch and, as McCord writes, “Coyote has never sung better.” Philip St. Clair’s book At the Tent of Heaven appeared in 1984 from Ahsahta Press.

Selected Poems

Norman Macleod — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:01:38 PST

When Ahsahta Press began to publish poetry in 1975, the first poet selected by press founder and editor Tom Trusky was native westerner Norman MacLeod. MacLeod, born in 1906, had been published in some of the leading periodicals of his day and also produced several novels. After fifty years of writing, teaching, and publishing, his poetry had become largely unknown to contemporary readers. The editors of Ahsahta Press sought out a representative body of MacLeod’s work and presented Selected Poems as the inaugural publication of the then-burgeoning press. More than a quarter-century later, contemporary readers still have the opportunity to read and appreciate Norman MacLeod for his writing, his contributions to the literature of the western United States, and for his place in Ahsahta Press history.

Men At Work

Bill Witherup — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:48:16 PDT

This collection explores the tension between public and private arenas, with the figure of the laborer juxtaposed against that of the poet. Learning to “snap a line,” in Bill Witherup’s world, is as much about manual labor as it is about writing. Witherup has created a dynamic form of poetic memoir where the personal abuts the political and elegy intermingles with vivid stories about what kills us while we are alive. The poems in Men at Work concern themselves with the survival of the world as it should be, even when faced with how the world actually is: they are tough, filled with a beautiful, sorrowful hope. Displaying black humor in one line and lyrical natural beauty in the next, Men at Work is a triumph of theme, craft, and vision that surprises the reader with every move.

Agua Negra

Leo Romero — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:36:23 PDT

The poems of Leo Romero’s Agua Negra are set in a small Northern New Mexico village whose name means “black water”—or “dangerous water.” The site of a miracle (the image of Christ appearing on a wall), Agua Negra's people and customs, as Keith Wilson says in his introduction, are “as much 17th Century Spanish as they are anything resembling ‘American.’ ” The stories related in these poems have the ring of folktales and village gossip; after reading them one feels slowly returned to the present world, like the speaker in “End of the Columbus Day Weekend” driving home after his visit: “It began in the mountains/ coming down a winding/ canyon road, ten miles/ at a snail’s pace, elk hunters/ before me and behind me/ Everyone wanting to pass....” One leaves Romero’s poems only reluctantly. Published in 1981, Agua Negra was the first of Romero’s books from Ahsahta Press; his volume Going Home Away Indian appeared in 1990.

The Year-God

Gerrye Payne — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:33:23 PDT

Curved Like An Eye

George Perreault — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:31:49 PDT

George Perreault’s Curved Like an Eye is an entrancing collection of works that explore personal loss and the resolution of love. It is a hard, distinct poetry in which the author prods the dark impulse of humanity and its own ache for renewal—its Spring when, as with the Ruminari, all possessions are burnt ceremoniously—leaving the spirit “clean, naked.” Perreault searches his own memory, his own yearnings, and finds not meaning or understanding, but brilliant and often haunting fragments of images tied to half-recollections of passions and vague motives. If at times he finds himself “clean, naked,” it is without denying the likelihood of soon falling back into familiar patterns. But it is this recognition of the oscillations of life’s familiar patterns where the transformation of the poet’s vision begins. The hard, often hostile particulars and people of his Western landscape shine forth brilliantly.

Deer in the Haystack

Dixie Partridge — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:31:48 PDT

Dixie Partridge’s first book, Deer in the Haystacks, is amazingly unified in theme and style. She writes of her past without lapsing into nostalgia; her sense of time is less literal and more experiential, and the past and present often fuse into one. Although she does not write solely of death and the cold of Wyoming, these subjects are rarely far away. These poems display a strong sense of craft and of Partridge’s understanding that what is left unsaid is often as important as that which is said.

The Abalone Heart

Barbara Meyn — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:31:46 PDT

Barbara Meyn’s The Abalone Heart is a collection that adheres to a premise Henry David Thoreau held: poems arise from the very ground the poet stands on. And indeed, Meyn’s works stem directly from what’s at hand in the locale of her northern California home. “The importance of the place where she walks is not in her footprints, which are very much like anyone else’s,” writes D.L. Emblen in the book's introduction; “it is in the genuineness of the work that comes out of the place, a genuineness which grows out of the care with which this poet takes in this place.” Meyn’s eye detects the small brilliances of the living world around her, mending the often-ignored glimmers into a form of her own in which discovered connections make the real things significant.

Up Here

Donald Schenker — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:30:39 PDT

At a time when much of the literary world was concerned with the “urban heartbeat,” Schenker, in his sequence of poems “Hurd’s Gulch, 1986–1987,” was delighting in the minutiae and particular of the natural world. Be it quail, cows, or oak, small, precise details shimmer under Schenker’s examination. In his sequence “Austin Creek, 1969–1970,” Schenker uses a narrative of the momentary; an immediate vision or flash, like a car passing on a dark highway. The poems of Austin Creek inhabit that space on the edge of rural towns—longer lines and generous detail—although still the subject is nature as the elements deconstruct what work man has done. Throughout the book, Schenker maintains a fiercely ironic and self-conscious tone.

To The Fierce Guard in the Assyrian Saloon

Howard W. Robertson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:28:08 PDT

The delight of this book is the constant surprise. Lee Douglas’s physical and contemplative world is where the quotidian meets the sublime and does a hula dance. Howard W. Robertson creates a persona who whispers in our ear to come along on his bumpy and glorious ride. The reader is then placed in lush rooms of wordplay and acute observation, while also being allowed a sense of intimacy. The poetry accesses Lee Douglas’s perspective with a curious and compelling simultaneity, akin to reading a journal and hearing internal monologue. This is a landscape where a sensei wears a cowboy hat and scrambled eggs are symptomatic of authentic being. However this is not an entirely ethereal world; the poems also create a narrative where we meet Douglas’s children, ex-wife, and even the new city budget manager. Robertson reminds the reader that living is a beautiful and terrible mystery that is best faced with humor, endurance, and love. Robertson’s intense language makes Lee Douglas’ perceptions a pleasurable and powerful reminder.

Hannah's Travel

Richard Speakes — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:28:07 PDT

Richard Speakes’s Hannah’s Travel is a collection of poems linked by narrative and theme and told in sequence. Set in 1851–52 between Macune, Missouri, and Ft. Laramie, Wyoming, all are told by Speakes's arresting heroine Hannah. Not only do these poems comprise one lyric poem that works as a whole; they stand on their own and behave like single entities as well. The syntax is a bit formal to our ears—this conveys both a sense of an earlier colloquial range and of the formality used by a verbal person without verbal education to match her natural talent. These poems are about the men with whom Hannah will set out on an adventure, and her stories of what they hope and fear to find.

Prayers for the Dead Ventriloquist

D.J. Smith — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:25:14 PDT

In Prayers for the Dead Ventriloquist, his first collection of poems, Smith mines childhood memories—snapshots not only of family, but of a mischievous youth—with a precise poetic vision. “This harsh, particular light,” writes Dorianne Laux in her introduction to Smith’s book, “falls first on the people who pass through his small world.” Smith relates episodes of a reality unclean and unpolished, even at times horrific, yet always strangely beautiful. It is this beauty alone that offers reconciliation—the rising hair of woman in an automobile slowly consumed by flames, the metallic body of a hummingbird, the delicate bones of a lover’s back—small pleasures of day’s persistence.

To The Natural World

Genevieve Taggard — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:25:14 PDT

Genevieve Taggard began writing verse in 1907 when she was thirteen, and went on to publish eleven books of poetry and a biography of Emily Dickinson. Taggard, who died in 1948, published poems in The Nation, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and was widely anthologized, but never published a full-length collection. To the Natural World was assembled by Taggard’s daughter, Marcia Liles, especially for the Ahsahta Modern and Contemporary Poetry of the American West series. Taggard’s American natural world spans from Washington and Hawaii to New Hampshire and Vermont. Then she whisks us off to observations of Capri, Mallorca, and Antibes. Sense of place is the passion behind Taggard's melody and rhythm, and these qualities animate this collection of poetry. To the Natural World is a book that allows you to walk with this remarkable woman, this extraordinary poet, and make her poems and history momentarily your own.

At the Tent of Heaven

Philip St.Clair — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:25:13 PDT

St. Clair’s poems in At The Tent of Heaven are twenty-two portraits of Native Americans. The poems are ordered, St. Clair says, “to represent displacement by the whites, the persistence and continuation of Native beliefs, and an ultimate spiritual transcendence.” Reading these poems is like reading history of great importance—the lives of an Ioway Chief, a Chippewa Warrior, the wives of Red Jacket, Red Jacket himself, his daughters. But St. Clair’s goal wasn't to retell Native American history, rather to retell and uncover human truths. The poems present themselves like a wall of photographs, each photo with its own story. St. Clair’s words and images give sight and sound to language, and these poems talk. In 1986, Ahsahta Press published another collection by Philip St. Clair, Little-Dog-of-Iron.

Theory of Twilight

Gary Short — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:22:45 PDT

In his collection Theory of Twilight, Gary Short finds a quiet spirituality in everyday experiences, childhood memories, and natural occurrences. In poems that range in inspiration from a meditation by Basho to the stark landscapes and highways of Nevada, readers travel with Short down a highway where one encounters a schoolyard of students exercising (“scissoring into an X/ then closing to an I”) or brothers playing catch with a football (“the space between us/ filling with darkness”); where the receding glow of red taillights evokes the memory of a father smoking cigarettes in the dark, waiting for his son to come home. In the book’s title poem “Theory of Twilight,” a narrative of how a family comes together at the death of the speaker’s brother, Short’s description of the casketed body is plain-spoken and moving: “His father had touched his eyes closed, mothered / the shock of black hair from his forehead / and made into prayer, finger by finger / the hands.”

Songs

Charley John Greasybear — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:55:45 PDT

Songs is a collection of one Native American’s oral poetry captured on paper. A therapy client of the poet and psychologist Judson Crews, Charley John Greasybear told his poems to Crews, who wrote them down and assembled this collection. As J. Whitebird explains in the introduction, “Some of the poems speak clearly of his bonds to his native community, bonds which most of us will never have the good fortune to experience. Some of them cry of his violent and confused efforts to blend in with a homogenized America. But that is the point; Charley John sings openly of his view of wonderful and terrifying multiple worlds.”

Selected Poems

Hazel Hall — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:54:25 PDT

Published by Ahsahta in 1980, The Selected Poems of Hazel Hall originally appeared in three published volumes: Curtains (1921), Walkers (1923), and City of Time (1928). Hall had an exceptionally short period of productivity. Born in 1886, she published her first poem at the age of thirty. Her poetry appeared in Poetry, Dial, Harper’s, Yale Review, The Nation, Literary Review, Lyric, Contemporary Verse, and Bookman before her work slipped into obscurity. Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, awarded Hall the Young Poet’s Prize in 1921. Hall was confined to a wheelchair from the age of twelve after a bout of scarlet fever. Although her days were spent in an upstairs room of a large house in Portland, Oregon, her poetry has a vivid richness that extends outside her room and even her own time. Her sonnets are reminiscent of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, although more gentle in their mental and emotional lacerations. Her world is absolutely feminine—achingly interior, forgotten, small and delicate—and absolutely razor sharp, clearly making her a modern poet.

Sky River

Nan Hannon — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:54:24 PDT

Nan Hannon’s Sky River, first published in 1991, is a work that cleaves hard, archaeological substance to fragments of emotion and intellect. It is a poetry in which Hannon, bent above the detritus of our ancestors, reflects upon the passage of time and the timelessness of the heart.