Just Past Labor Day: Selected and New Poems, 1969-1996

Kirk Robertson, according to critic William Kittredge, is "one of those writers we listen to with gratitude." He is also one of Nevada’s best-known poets, and rightly so, because his lean verses powerfully express the realities of life in the modern West—its irony, disconnection, sadness, and relentless quest for meaning and a sense of place.

Robertson’s view is as vast as the landscape itself, and his voice echoes the place—laconic, authentic, rich in irony and the quiet strength of solitary men, full of the harshness and austere power of the High Desert.

This collection incorporates poems selected from Robertson’s large and prolific oeuvre with a generous gathering of recent, hitherto uncollected work. In reading these poems, we understand why Robertson has won his far-flung reputation. He is distinctly a poet of Nevada, of the West, but his poems help us locate ourselves, wherever we are.