Breathing the West: Great Basin Poems (Working Lives) - Softcover

Norman, Liane Ellison

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933964618 ISBN 13: 9781933964614

Publisher: Bottom Dog Press, 2012

Synopsis

In a passage from his 1939 journal, Liane Ellison Norman's father might be writing presciently about her own poetic intentions. "My purpose, I think, is social: to lead people toward sanity & wisdom by recovering the primitive environment." The environment Norman brings us in Breathing the West is a rich terrain of family, memory, passionate social commitments, and sharply-observed detail. As you journey with her through these poems, you'll be glad you met her people, shared her experiences, and travelled her personal landscape. You'll find she's moved you toward sanity and wisdom, too. -Richard St. John, author of The Pure Inconstancy of Grace: Poems
Breathing the West is an historical and natural history in poetry of the Great Basin and the Wasatch mountains of Utah where the poet Liane Norman grew up and where "the back slopes...taught (her) how to breathe." There's a lot of room to breathe in the West and, using family stories, her naturalist father's journals, and her own clear-eyed memories, Norman evokes its vastness with stunning imagery and sonorous lines. I am both delighted and taught by these wild and welcome poems. -Maggie Anderson, author of Windfall: New and Selected Poems

About this title

Book Description

Poems of people and place, of environment and nature brought close through love of family.|Breathing the West: Great Basin Poems

About the Author

Liane Ellison Norman was born in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, the eldest of four daughters of a Forest Service range ecologist and an elementary school teacher. She grew up in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, was educated in Iowa and Massachusetts, gave birth to the middle of three children in Kathmandu, Nepal and has lived in Pittsburgh, PA for the last 45 years. She has been a writer all her life: in the fifth grade she wrote her biography-and bound stitched-together pages in fabric-covered boards with pasted-down end pages. Norman won the Wisteria Prize for poetry in 2006 from Paper Journey Press. She has published two earlier books of poetry, The Duration of Grief and Keep, a book about nonviolent protest against nuclear bomb parts makers, Mere Citizens: United, Civil and Disobedient, a biography, Hammer of Justice: Molly Rush and the Plowshares Eight, and Stitches in Air: A Novel About Mozart's Mother.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bottom Dog Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1933964618
• ISBN 13: 9781933964614
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 96