About Books: Spring 2019
On the Chinese Wall: New & Selected Poems, 1966–2018
By Roger Dunsmore
Roger Dunsmore’s latest volume, published by Drumlummon Institute, gathers some 50 years of writing in a collection that Stephen Osborne describes this way: “Informed by the lyric past of ancient Greece and the visionary traditions of ancient America as expressed by the Sioux visionary Black Elk. Here, among echoes of Archilochos and Meister Eckhart, can be found a poem for a loose ram, for a woman kissing all the icons in the Byzantine Museum in Athens, for a trapper in Montana whose pet wolverine loved Oreo cookies.”
He continues, “Dunsmore’s poetry derives from an older world of people, creatures, and things held in the compromising embrace of the New: Che Guevera in the mountains; the voices of students in China; and a man named Mike Blue Horse, ‘best night-hawker on the Hi-line,’ dancing solo in a bar in Montana.”
“Roger Dunsmore’s collection runs as deep as the river of time,” writes Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red. “Ways of seeing the world are renewed and retooled. These poems seem in tune with the hum of ancient spirits. The old earth sings.”
Dunsmore, a former professor at the University of Montana, has authored nine other collections of poetry. He refers to Montana as “the greatest Mother Muse any poet could hope for.”
Flight Path
By Becca Carson
In her debut collection of poems, Missoula author Becca Carson explores what it means to be temporary in an unpredictable but seemingly infinite landscape.
The largely autobiographical collection challenges the notion that time is a linear function by examining the ways in which grief framed her childhood. “Mothers always pass on what haunts them./ I found her like this: only eleven, stick thin, but already/ wearing eyes like mine: canyon dark and starless.”
And she celebrates resilience: “For the first time I wondered if I could be/ a crime scene, a war memorial, and also/ a holy place …”
The collection is part of the Montana Poets Series, edited by Craig Czury and published by FootHills Publishing. Carson competes in the occasional poetry slam and has published one non-fiction piece in Mama-
lode magazine. She teaches English and introductory creative writing at Big Sky High School, and heads the Aerie Magazine Program, which publishes two student-produced literary arts magazines annually.
She describes herself as “governed by insatiable curiosity.”
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