Poems of the American West [Hardcover]

In this provocative and thoughtful anthology, many voices join in illuminating the remarkably vast and varied American West. The verse collected here ranges from American Indian tribal poems to old folk songs like “The Streets of Laredo,” from country-western lyrics to the work of such foreign poets as Bertolt Brecht and Zbigniew Herbert. Here is the West in all its rich variety–the harsh life of farms and ranches; man’s destructive invasion into forest and desert solitudes; the bars and bistros of San Francisco and Hollywood; Pacific surf and endless highways; the ghost towns, the poverty, and the legendary world of cowpunchers and gunslingers.

From Robert Frost’s “Once by the Pacific” to Charles Bukowski’s “Vegas,” from Fred Koller’s “Lone Star State of Mind” to Thom Gunn’s “San Francisco Streets”–the West is evoked in all its incarnations, both actual and mythic.Foreword

ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)
Once by the Pacific
Auspex
The Gift Outright

GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE (1880–1918)
Annie

WITTER BYNNER (1881–1968)
Defeat

ROBINSON JEFFERS (1887–1962)
Compensation
The Eye

FOLKSONGS
Me and My Uncle
Jesse James
The Streets of Laredo
The Buffalo Skinners

THOMAS HORNSBY FERRIL (1896–1988)
Bookmarks
Science Came West

BERTOLT BRECHT (1898–1956)
Hollywood
Landscape of Exile

JANET LEWIS (1899–1998)
For John Muir, a Century and More Afte His Time

TRIBAL POEMS
Chippewa: “Sometimes I go about”
Yokuts: Song of the Eclipse
Makah: Song
Hidatsa: We Made a Fire
Papago: Song of the Brown Buzzard
Dakota: Song of Reproach
Chippewa: Where the Fight Was
Pawnee: Better to Die Young
Crow: Prayer Offering
Malecite: Tale
Pawnee: l“Ô