Select Poems Of Richard West

Author : Richard G. Barnes
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Download or read book A Word Like Fire written by Richard G. Barnes and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Thank you, other twolegged bare featherless creature, for sharing the jagged horizon of my life. Thank you rainbow over the East Mojave low to the ground so early in the afternoon: thank you for being here with us." - from "Bagdad Chase Road in July" "A Word Like Fire," the first comprehensive selection of his poems, should confirm Dick Barnes's place as one of the most accomplished and likable American poets of the last fifty years. His great subject is the Mojave Desert, the vast basin of ranges and valleys east and north of Los Angeles, with its beautiful shrubs and flowers, magnificent trees, ephemeral grasses, high lakes, rivers and dry river beds, alfalfa farms, and isolated towns with names like Essex, Cadiz Summit, Elephant Butte, Running Springs, Helendale, and often canny and solitary men and women. Of this world, Dick Barnes gives an indelible portrait in poem after poem. But Barnes is more than a regional poet. As Robert Mezey writes in his brilliant Foreword, "He has an engaging variety of subjects, and to almost all of them he gives faithful perception and love." He is a master of the elegy, and wrote love poems, satires, devotional poems, and, Mezey notes, "poems of wry social comment and occasionally anger." In works such as "A Visit to Lonesome John: Autumn Coming," "Few and Far Between," "Clearing the Way," "Example and Admonition," and "Trophy Hunt" surely one of the masterpieces of American poetry the reader encounters a keenly observant, knowledgeable, humane, and passionate poet."