Handspan of Red Earth

Book excerpt: Poems of farm life are very much an American tradition and, despite our industrial heritage, in some ways they depict our national dream. Distinctly apart from the English pastoral motif, these hard-edged, reflective poems of the joys, tribulations, and realizations of rural life continue a tradition which began with Bradstreet and persisted through Whittier and Frost to the various and passionate poets included in this rich anthology. Here is contemporary poetry about the archetypal but ever-changing work of farming the American land. Catherine Marconi has included pieces from a wide variety of poets writing on the various landscapes of American farms: from the rocky New England fields through the deep topsoil of the heartland and the fecund tobacco, cotton, and vegetable lands of the South, from the hardscrabble cattle ranches of the Southwest to the verdant fields of the West. These poems, by some of our country's finest living poets, will be evocative and revealing to anyone who has ever lived or worked on a farm. Included in the volume are poems by, among others, Galway Kinnell, Gary Soto, Dennis Schmitz, Annie Dillard, Donald Hall, Ai, Tom McGrath, Gretel Ehrlich, William Stafford, Mary Swander, Gary Snyder, Larry Levis, Maxine Kumin, William Heyen, Hayden Carruth, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Stanley Kunitz.