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The Selected Poems Of Gwendolen Haste, Gwendolen Haste

Ahsahta Press

Even though Gwendolen Haste has lived and worked in New York City since 1925, she is still a Western poet. She spent a number of her most productive years in Billings, Montana, helping her father edit the Scientific Farmer; and her best poems picture the lives of ranchers—men, women, and children—in the years when the West was being settled.

Forty and more years later, these Western poems still speak strongly of and to the experience of women anywhere—on a ranch, in a suburb, in a city. Perhaps this is because they speak of a loneliness, an isolation, a boredom that …

A Taste Of The Knife, Marnie Walsh

Ahsahta Press

As an outdoorswoman, an observer of hunters, Indians, creatures of nature, and the things of earth, Marnie Walsh seems to have been most impressed by the grimness of life. The sordid and the brutal, in both man and nature, enter her poems with more force and more power than do the lyrical elements of a very few of her poems. Most of these poems, especially in their observations of Indians, are character sketches with a persistent similarity. Their strength derives from accumulated evidence, from repetition which is much like the pounding of a drum. One beat is hardly distinguishable from …

New & Selected Poems, Peggy Pond Church

Ahsahta Press

Peggy Pond Church spent nearly her whole life among the mesas and mountains of New Mexico, and her love of that landscape permeates many of the poems in this collection. Born in 1903, Church authored four volumes of poems between 1933 and 1954, and this book makes twelve additional uncollected works available.

“Mrs. Church’s poetry is distinctly of this time, the work of a fine human being, concerned with the terror of the hour,” wrote William Rose Benét, reviewing the book Ultimatum for Man for Saturday Review of Literature in 1946, the year of its publication. As T.M. Pearce notes …

John G. Neihardt, Lucile F. Aly

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In the literature celebrating the rugged spirit and tenacious optimism of the American West, John G. Neihardt, a Nebraska poet, raised one of the most vigorous voices. It sounds in his lyrics and rings through his epic masterwork, A Cycle of the West, in blended notes of wonder at the universe and deeper strains of human sorrow. His inspiration came from what he called the “glorious experience of living."

Bill Nye: The Western Writings, David B. Kesterson

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Though closely identified with the American West, Edgar Wilson Nye was born in the East and lived most of his life in the Midwest and South. Born in Shirley, Maine, on August 25, 1850, the eldest son of Franklin and Elizabeth Mitchell (Loring) Nye, Edgar was to remain a New Englander for only two years. As his future friend and lecture partner James Whitcomb Riley would later write in a comic account of Nye’s life, “At two years of age he took his parents by the hand, and, telling them that Piscataquis County was no place for them, he boldly …

Gertrude Atherton, Charlotte S. Mcclure

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Gertrude Atherton's story-chronicle of old Spanish and new American California appeared at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of her sixty-year-long career. Eighteen of her thirty-four novels, three of her four collections of short stories, and all three of her histories drew their inspiration from California, covering the area in the years from the 1800’s through the 1930's.

Hamlin Garland: The Far West, Robert Gish

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Hamlin Garland is regarded today with both condescension and respect. His Middle-Western writings, the early and later phases of his work, are more highly regarded than are the Far-Western writings of his middle phase. The cause of this unevenness in the Garland canon can be traced to his attraction to history and story, propaganda and art, Realism and Romanticism. The boundaries of fiction and non-fiction contract and expand throughout Garland’s work, just as in his life he trailed and back-trailed from the Midwest to the East and West. In this sense Garland’s writing is inseparably autobiographical and regional; and his …