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Words from a Wide Land by William D. Barney |
If you enjoyed books like A Sand County Almanac or A Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, you'll love Words from a Wide Land. Barney brings insights of people and places, natural phenomena, birds, animals, insects, and other things he has encountered in many years of living and traveling.
In these entries (a year's worth, though not in chronological order by year), can be found humor, romance, delight, philosophy, even terror. He has measured the life about him with a flair, which at times bursts into poetry.
"September 6, 1977.
"May 12, 1967. The Swainson thrush has been fluting his little strangled bugle call from the red mulberry tree now several days. It is much like the wood thrush's call in quality, but reduced in an echo chamber, to a mere whisper. Still, it is an unmistakable signature of one week in May, which I have hardly heard at any other time."
The migration of birds
Resembles Pickett's Charge.
Thousands are lost
In frontal collisions with skyscrapers,
Are picked off by rough predators,
Buffeted by wind and storm.
But they keep coming on, advancing,
Year after year, as if there were
No Cemetery Ridge."
"September 20, 1965. At evening, an enormous white rose of thunderhead at the zenith, with one small blushing patch of pink. It vibrated with sheet lightning. I never saw a rose whose waxen skin winked, quivered so. Occasional hairpins of lightning broke around it."
WILLIAM D. BARNEY, past president of the Poetry Society of Texas and a member of the Poetry Society of America, has won two Texas Institute of Letters Awards as well as the Robert Frost Memorial Award for a narrative poem, accepting the award from Frost himself in 1962. In 1982 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Texas. He has published six books of poetry.
Words from a Wide Land
ISBN 0-929398-64-5 $12.95
LC 93-29508. 5x7. 194 pp. 12 b&w illus.
Literature and Literary Topics. Literary Nonfiction. Natural History.
Publication Date: February 1994.
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