These poems, in traditional and modern forms using mostly country metaphors, celebrate human and animal residents of the western prairie, preserving the strong voices and matter-of-fact, often ironic, view of existence there; at the same time they deal with universal themes such as nostalgia, isolation, death, and mature love. Life's essential ambivalence is a constant and is presented with realism and occasional wry humor. The author includes an Afterward which examines the idea of poems in general and gives hints for reading his own.

"Home" is the story of growing and growing up in a place where human beings made a hard land home, a place of profound trust and security, space, and responsibility. It celebrates family, the family of father and mother, the extended family of uncles and aunts and grandparents, the larger family of community, molded by the land and weather and time, yet never reduced by necessity into confusing making a living with making a life. "Home" is about living in an agrarian world of the 30's and 40's, with all the usual uncertainties connected with crops and animal husbandry, and all the certainties...

In "Leaving Lakehouse" the author tells his own story from the perspective of one who sees the beauty in life without rose colored glasses, and also its limitations-including his own-face to face, without benefit of palliative myth. It is Everyman's story without Everyman's assurances, human mortality always an echo in 'Leaving," but treated as a fact of the human condition not to be denied as part of the fabric of an individual history. 'Lakehouse" becomes the focus for describing and accepting one's place in reality, which is described with a recurring wry irony, and with occasional spurts...

Americana, mostly west and southwest, original and traditional poetic forms, serious to whimsical