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OLD & LOST RIVERS

OLD & LOST RIVERS

$16.95Price

ISBN: 978-0-9839975-0-4

Pub Date: Spring 2012

Pages: 76


By J.T. Ledbetter


WINNER OF THE IDAHO PRIZE FOR POETRY 2011


Old & Lost Rivers is a collection of poems about people who have been beaten down by bad weather, poor crops, and little love save what their memories have put away, much like the clothes they came to each other in, now in a cedar chest or in the root cellar with potatoes, jars and eggs. Many of the poems are harsh, even cruel—poems John Van Doren has called, "a report of a vanishing world that was always achingly inarticulate and therefore of violent heart."—yet there is release of one kind or another, through fantasy or revenge: often it comes in a tired acceptance of what is. And, as in life, there is the momentary humor. It is almost always short-lived, but it is there and it is honest.

    There is a certain quietness in J.T. Ledbetter’s Old and Lost Rivers. Each poem is a lull, a seductive silence, that follows the rhythms of the flowing hills of the Palouse and the rolling rivers which usher the relaxed reader along on a journey that is clear and definite and concise. The strength of Ledbetter’s poems is in that dreamlike, pastoral, almost hypnotic rhythm of each poem coupled with a pertinent, subtle re-call to consciousness in every ending. One could easily get lost in these poems, and one would definitely be better for it.

    —Raymond Hammond, editor of New York Quarterly


    J.T. Ledbetter’s Old & Lost Rivers is a brilliant book, full of the delight of an abundant life well-lived. Ledbetter has the rare gift of being able to transform explicit memory into archetype, to spin out the narrative of his remembrance so that it evokes ours. Nature is everywhere with sudden, unexpected, aching beauty and restorative harshness, and the farm also with its woods and streams, cows moving in their stanchions, and long, silent distances between house and barn and between house and town. But always Ledbetter’s focus is people, on who they are to each other and to themselves, on people touching each other or losing and sometimes finding again that ability to touch. Readers of Old & Lost Rivers (real rivers and those of time, memory, and experience) learn again how precious, fragile, tough, and beautiful life is.

    —Gordon Cheesewright, Ph.D, Professor of English, Ft. Lewis College


    J.T. Ledbetter holds a B.A. in English from California State University Long Beach, M.A. and Ph.D in English from the University of Nebraska where he studied under Karl Shapiro, and the critic Lee Lemon. Dr. Ledbetter is currently Professor Emeritus at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California. J.T. Ledbetter’s poems can be found in literary journals, including Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The New York Quarterly, Laurel Review, Louisville Review, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, Atlanta Review, The Formalist, Tar River Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and many others. His poems have been anthologized in New American Poetry (McGraw-Hill, 1973); Men And Women: Together and Apart (The Spirit That Moves Us Press, 1990); Gridlock (Applezaba Press, 1990); Seriously Meeting Shapiro (Negative Capability Press, 1993); Only Morning In Her Shoes (Utah State University Press, 1990). Underlying Premises, a collection of poems, was published by Lewis Clark Press in September 2010.

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