Great Lonely Places Of The Texas Plains

Clarity, focus, and startling detail are the stuff of lasting images--in poetry or photography. Who better, then, to illuminate what would elude us than a native state photographer and native state poet laureate? Selected from hundreds of photographs and poems, these pairs show surprising harmony of vision and insights about the vast, wide plains, their dramatic colors, and the calm, vigorous people who thrive beneath their sprawling skies, accepting the risks and splendor of it all. Together and on their own, these photos and poems astonish and delight, stagger and jostle, each resonating with texture and joy.

Dave Oliphant is widely considered the finest poetry critic ever produced by Texas. This volume brings together some 40 years of essays, articles, and reviews on the topic of Texas poetry -- its history as well as addressing individual poets and their books. Only one other book in the last two decades addressed the topic, and GENERATIONS OF TEXAS POETS is larger, more comprehensive, and of superior literary quality. In 1971, Larry McMurtry famously descried the lack of good Texas poetry; Oliphant has spent a lifetime nurturing it, publishing it, and has become its best critic.

2005 SPUR Award WinnerA West Texas starscape, stunning by any measure, is emblematic of Walt McDonald?s plains. A lifelong celebration culminates in this, his best?and perhaps last?collection of new poems. At seventy, the poet affirms, we live by the mystery of grace even as we watch familiar stars blink out at dawn. For he believes ?God knows we are dust / and counts our steps.? In ?Leaving the Middle Years,? he writes, ?At our age, / every day is grace and every breath / a blessing. Life is grass, stunningly brief / but abundant in so many ways.?Walt writes about heroes?a mother who taught tumbling; family and friends gone to war; the brave at home who heal or console; others who rescue from war zones as many children as they can. Heroes, too, are those whose fidelity and joy find faces in these poems. Watching crows at dawn in Montana, a husband thinks of his wife inside their mountain cabin:If Ursula finds more grayshe?ll go on humming, knowing it?s okay,our children three thousand miles awaybut fine, when they called last night.She comes outside with coffee,closing the door so softlyeven the crows don?t stop.

The vast, disparate region called West Texas is both sparsely populated and scarcely recognized. Yet it has given voice to a surprising number of women writers who have left more than a faint impression on its hardscrabble terrain and consciousness. These writers do much more than evoke the land and its celebrated skies. Often with humor and alw...

This environmental history of the Brazos traces the techniques that engineers and politicians have repeatedly used to try to manage its flow.

The first major autobiography by a Texas poet, this noteworthy account traces the life and times of a poet, publisher, critic, and teacher from his childhood to the present day. This remarkable life is examined through the works it produced--25 books in the fields of poetry, fiction, translation, jazz history, and book reviewing. Proving that the literary and intellectual life in Texas far surpasses the state's stereotypes, this record shows how the poet was instrumental in connecting Texas with many Latin American writers as well as with a wide world of music.