Just Past Labor Day Selected & new Poems, 1965-1995

Kirk Robertson, according to critic William Kittredge, is "one of those writers we listen to with gratitude." He is also one of Nevada’s best-known poets, and rightly so, because his lean verses powerfully express the realities of life in the modern West—its irony, disconnection, sadness, and relentless quest for meaning and a sense of place.

Robertson’s view is as vast as the landscape itself, and his voice echoes the place—laconic, authentic, rich in irony and the quiet strength of solitary men, full of the harshness and austere power of the High Desert.

This collection incorporates poems selected from Robertson’s large and prolific oeuvre with a generous gathering of recent, hitherto uncollected work. In reading these poems, we understand why Robertson has won his far-flung reputation. He is distinctly a poet of Nevada, of the West, but his poems help us locate ourselves, wherever we are.

Kirk Robertson (1946–2017) was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 1994 and authored over eighteen poetry books. Program director for the Churchill Arts Council, he was the editor of neon: Artcetera from the Nevada State Council on the Arts and lived in Fallon, Nevada. Kirk was a founding board member of the Nevada Statewide Arts Assembly, as well as founder of Scree magazine and Duckdown Press. He wrote about the visual arts for a number of publications and agencies, including Yellowstone Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Lake Worth, FL), Sheppard Gallery at UNR, Artweek, the Reno News & Review, and his weekly column, "Sounding," for the Lahontan Valley News.