The Bluebird Run is a monumental collection of 180 new sonnets by Montana, poet, memoirist, artist and musician Greg Keeler. Ranging from humorous flights to poignant meditations on loss, love, aging and the fate of humanity faced with looming environmental and social crises, the poems in this collection showcase a highly lauded writer at the peak of his abilities. Fans of both Keeler's irreverently witty songwriting and his deep-thinking explorations into life's pains and mysteries will find much to treasure in this book.
"Greg Keeler is a treasure of the literary West. A master of the sonnet, his poetry one moment can be laugh-out-loud funny and the next so deeply poignant, his grief, or fear, or loss, or regret becomes your own. A true poet of rivers and all the lonely roads to get to them, he seems alone and far away and yet his voice is always, always right there." -Rick Ardinger, Limberlost Press
"A collection of 180 sonnets comes with its own built-in challenge: unless the form is renewed at every instance, the author runs the risk of being admired for sheer tenacity, for having mastered merely the mechanics dictated by convention. In The Bluebird Run, the challenge has been met. These wonderful sonnets are alive in their language and in the rich variation of their music as they explore, sometimes with humor, sometimes with pathos but always with sharp originality the permanent themes: love, death, nature. This is a remarkable achievement. The creative dynamo that is Greg Keeler (poet, painter, songwriter) has been for too long a well-kept secret. Here's to The Bluebird Run blowing his cover." -Ricardo Sternberg, author of Some Dance
"Who would have thought that what Wordsworth called the sonnet's 'scanty plot of ground' could so congenially accommodate the (sur)real estate we find in Greg Keeler's The Bluebird Run? As we move among these unnerving, strange, often absurd, hysterically funny, sad, profoundly moving and ultimately sublimely wise poems, we find something more than Wordsworth's 'brief solace'--we find deep and abiding consolation. What more can we ask of a poet at this time?" - Michael Sexson, regents' professor, Montana State University
"A poet committed to making the formal informal and the ineffable accessible while exploring this journey of living and dying, this dog-eared catalog of loss."- Mark Gibbons, author of The Imitation Blues
"Keeler illuminates the details that make life on earth both brutal and beautiful."- Rose DeMaris, author of The Lovebird
"As humanly perceptive and sensitive, as touching and as amusing, and as Richard Hugo-esque musical as poetry gets ... welcome to Greg Keeler's beatific creative infinity."- Paul Zarzyski, author of Steering with My Knees
Greg Keeler has published two memoirs, Waltzing with the Captain: Remembering Richard Brautigan (Limberlost Press) and Trash Fish: a Life (Counterpoint Press). Almost Happy (Limberlost) is his latest of seven collections of poetry. He illustrated Jim Harrison's chapbook, Livingston Suite, NPR's Car Talk aired his song "WD-40 Polka," and Garrison Keillor read his poetry on three segments of The Writer's Almanac. He lives in Bozeman where he taught in the English department at Montana State University from 1975 through 2014.
