The 65 poems in this volume are about a boy who later flies as an Air Force pilot, marries a beautiful woman and who goes home after a war to friends and family. The poems celebrate the wonder and need of all occasions, the heartache and longing and joy of being alone or loved.

The 65 poems in this volume are about a boy who later flies as an Air Force pilot, marries a beautiful woman and who goes home after a war to friends and family. The poems celebrate the wonder and need of all occasions, the heartache and longing and joy of being alone or loved.

For years, I ve wondered in amazement how Walt McDonald does what he does, poem after poem, book after book. He sings like no one else. In "Climbing the Divide," McDonald has made his strongest collection of poems yet. David Citino, author of "The News and Other Poems"
"Climbing the Divide" must have been written with a pen Walt McDonald dipped into his heart. Crisscrossing generations, poems detail watching a grandfather with knuckles the size of walnuts carve a grizzly bear out of oak, taking car keys away from a father who drove tanks for Patton and thinking about nights in the jungle...

For years, I ve wondered in amazement how Walt McDonald does what he does, poem after poem, book after book. He sings like no one else. In "Climbing the Divide," McDonald has made his strongest collection of poems yet. David Citino, author of "The News and Other Poems"
"Climbing the Divide" must have been written with a pen Walt McDonald dipped into his heart. Crisscrossing generations, poems detail watching a grandfather with knuckles the size of walnuts carve a grizzly bear out of oak, taking car keys away from a father who drove tanks for Patton and thinking about nights in the jungle...

Walt McDonald's A Band of Brothers sheds light on the Vietnam war through the eyes of a pilot in painstaking detail. Walter McDonald's collection is] one of the most moving and insightful accounts of that "dirty little war" I have seen. This is a view of hell from an intelligent, sensitive eye, a tour of unimaginable horror conducted by one who has not only seen it but who has also felt it . Clay Reynolds"

On a soft summer Virginia evening Shelly Wagner was pushing her five-year-old son in a tire swing in the backyard, idling away the hours between dinner and bedtime. She left him only for a moment, but when she returned Andrew had disappeared. He was found later that night, drowned in the river behind their home. From the depths of grief that followed, Wagner began to write poems not as therapy, she says, but to see if she could express the range of her experience more fully than the published books she d read. What emerged from Wagner s quest is a volume of verse that has comforted and...

There is such excitement and joy in the poems of Laura Fargas a rush to embrace the earth, an exuberant "giddy greed" for life. "I like the voice, the spirit I find in her poems," says Walter McDonald. "She accepts and celebrates the rich possibilities and, even with the risks and limitations of all, insists that living on this earth is splendid." Grass the Fine Body Hairs of EarthMy shorthand for it is passion is holyWe can live inside the lilies-of-the-field text.Watching gulls startle off the groundas if hundreds of lashing wings are our native air.Breathe in wings, exhale speckled orange...

Who more than the Southwesterners who ve boldly claimed their home under the same tornado skies could have more cause to celebrate the millennium? And a celebration is exactly what Neugebauer and McDonald have forged in the historic photographs and poems they ve paired to tell the story of the settlement and so much more.Eighty-three photographs from Texas Tech University s Southwest Collection s bounty of more than 500,000 reflect needs basic to all humankind: food, clothing, shelter, government, recreation, and spirituality.McDonald s new and selected poems connect to the moments in time...

Clarity, focus, and startling detail are the stuff of lasting images in poetry or photography. It is all about beholding, about taking in what is ours to absorb if only we will. Little can overwhelm the senses more than our great lonely plains, expanses of sky and horizon so enormous that sometimes composition gets lost in between. Who better, then, to illuminate what would elude us than a native state photographer and native state poet laureate?Although Meinzer and McDonald have both devoted careers to seeing and celebrating these plains, garnering significant honors and awards along the...

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...