Midwest Book Review
Including over 150 poems and illustrated with forty vivid photographs of the western landscape, Poetry Of The American West chronicles the imagery of the American West over the course of its long and varied cultural heritage. Poetry Of The American West is the first to offer an inclusive collage of voices from a land where cultural collision is part of the rugged landscape. Covering the traditional and the exploratory, the ancient and the modern, ranging in tone from anger to celebration, Poetry Of The American West carves a new path through a fascinating landscape. Alison Deming has selected protest poems of the Chicano farmworkers' movement, cowboy songs traded around the campfire, and the romantic, lyrically lyrical work of Robert Hass and Joy Harjo. In an excursion south of the border, Deming has gathered for us Nahuatl flower songs from the Aztecs of fifteenth-century Mexico. In Poetry Of The American West sacred songs of the Native Americans mingle with the epic poems of Gaspar Perez de Villagra and John Neihardt. Here too are meditations on the region by Walt Whitman, Theodore Roethke, Willa Cather, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and Allen Ginsberg. Poetry Of The American West will be savored time and time again by those that admire the west enjoy it's poetry.
The San Francisco Review
[A] testament to the West´s powerful magnetism and survival.
