Rain Comes Riding

Rain Comes Riding details the poet William Sheldon's passion for the Great Plains. People loom against the horizon-his family, neighbors, runaways, working men, and also the people who lived in this place before, whose scattered flint tools remain still unchanged. He is a poet who embraces fully the contradictions of simulated realities existing, fragmented, in a timeless universe of flint and bluestem grass. Sheldon is a skilled, smart writer who has much to tell his readers about how to live with good conscience. This second book of the poet shows him creating a new genre of ballad.
Albert Goldbarth, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, says of Sheldon: "Many poets of estimable value are called to mind by Bill Sheldon's book: Kansas poets certainly (William Stafford, Steven Hind, Harley Elliot, Denise Low), and other-state poets with a knowing eye for the land, from the severe poems of Robinson Jeffers, to the more clement naturalism of Mary Oliver, to the savvy, stringent explorations of Wendell Berry. How can one read Sheldon's "Red" and not think of the poems of Phil Levine, their similar understanding of manual labor and the lives invested in that work? I could go on in this vein, but... Sheldon is finally a practitioner of his own voice and vision-albeit one that takes its place happily in a community of other poets-and Rain Comes Riding, steeped in history and family, in an intimacy of place and sometimes a wry sense of humor, is the rich record of a career in which the world and the word have been lovingly wedded."
William Sheldon lives with his family in Hutchinson, Kansas, where he teaches and writes. His first collection of poems, Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley Press), was named one of the Kansas City Star's Noteworthy Books of 2002. He has an MFA from Wichita State University.