NEW for 2010!
Click to enlarge Table of Contents
$10 plus 1.50 postage
cash or check to:
John Dofflemyer
P.O. Box 44320
:emon Cove, CA 93244
or
Praise for UNEVEN GREEN:
One of today’s most masterful Western poets, fifth-generation California rancher John Dofflemyer’s 2010 chapbook, UNEVEN GREEN, presents bold and organic observations and revelations. It is exceptional in the force of its vision and the contrast of the humility of its expression. The work of life, its pain and blessings, finds a steadfast place within the book’s covers.
There’s life’s ripeness throughout the selections, which gives way to natural reflections on the past. “Finding Home,” which begins “Packed mules all summer of ’66…” exemplifies the rare beauty and force of his writing, “my ears were eyes. Sometimes/you could hear the beasts inhale/before the ropes got tight, before/the story you hoped to tell exploded…” “To Hell in a Handbasket,” politically charged—or is it?—offers some philosophy for our times: “The rock doesn’t care any more, rivers/laugh off mountains, but the deserts/remember every word in our heads/….just/to find a way to keep the wagon moving/without the weight of hate.”
He writes of grief, including some elegies from a small, privately printed tribute to his mother. The emotion of those poems is never for grief’s sake. They are without sentimentality, told for what can be wrung from the experience of it, often going back to that effort of finding the way forward, again, the work of life.
John Dofflemyer is planted deeply in the soil where his family settled soon after the Gold Rush. His work grows from the dirt and sweat of that land. It often gives the promise of what men, women, and life can be; what nature offers for that quest; and always, his words show how poetry can illuminate the way.
– Margo Metegrano, cowboypoetry.com
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