Reading sand : selected desert poems, 1976-2000 / William L. Fox.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fox, William L., 1949-

Series:

Western literature series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Great Basin--Poetry.

Great Basin.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

xiii, 99 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Reno : University of Nevada Press, [2002]

Summary:

The ascetic and enigmatic vastness of the Great Basin has challenged the talents of many writers, but few have met the challenge as successfully as William L. Fox. In Reading Sand, Fox's elegant minimalist poems capture the essence of the Great Basin desert -- its daunting emptiness, the passage of light and wind across its surfaces, its colors and textures, its silence. In "perforated object," the collection's central piece. Fox uses a mysterious pierced-horn artifact discovered in Nevada's Humboldt Cave as the subject of an extended meditation on the nature of history and the absolute inscrutability of the Great Basin's complex past. The result is an intellectually provocative and aesthetically moving work of a lean grandeur rarely found in recent poetry. Fox, whose profound and insightful essays on the Great Basin have found many readers, is here at the top of his form as a poet. In Reading Sand. the Great Basin has found a voice both terse and eloquent, a voice worthy of this grand subject.

Contents:

Monody I

Geograph

Six parts 21

Leaving elko 24

Two canyons 27

Promontory 33

Brush fires 34

Sunset 39

Fibonnaci series 40

The winter field 44

The inland sea 49

Perforated object

Glass 55

Archaeologos 67

New sand 72

Pack rats 74

City 78

Petroglyphs 80

Pictographs 82

Scroll 85

Disowning 90.

ISBN:

0874174988

OCLC:

48837656