Land, Light, Wind and Water: Prairie Quartet: Elemental Meditations in Four Cycles

Land, Light, Wind, and Water is composed of poetic meditations on these four "elements" as they are experienced by those who dwell where the northern Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains. Here are four cycles of poems: Land Sake; The Big Lights; What the Wind Said; and The Sound of Many Waters.

Our (US) poetry is largely a poetry of place. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in its river settings was crowned by Hemingway as the Great American novel - and John G. Neihardt took the river themes into poetry, along with the plains and their peoples. The prairie, it's mountains, sky, and weather, have deeply affected our literature since Longfellow and Cooper moved us away from the Atlantic Ocean and New England into the Great Plains. Great spaces affected the thinking of ordinary Americans throughout the era of westward expansion, but those pioneers wrote very little that makes the universal claim of poetry. The more self-conscious literature of West and Plains remains dyed with romantic transcendentalism or is gone cynical in reaction to it.

There is an older view of things upon which this book and these poems are founded. Yet there is a freshness to these poems. Perhaps it arises from the poet's repose in that perspective. He regards some things as true - and some not. He writes autobiographically, but uses the voice of a narrative spokesman. These poems do not regard the big sky as too big for poetry, and the reader must assess the validity of that claim.

"The Big Lights" was originally published in England, in 1989, and a few other poems included here, as early as 1985. Most of the poems in this book appear in print for the first time here.