Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains - Softcover

Gilfillan, Merrill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555662277 ISBN 13: 9781555662271

Publisher: Johnson Books, 1998

Synopsis

In this new book detailing his travels through the American Great Plains, author Merrill Gilfillan continues to elucidate for us, and add to our appreciation of, one of the most ignored and misunderstood areas of our vast American landscape. Like few American writers, Gilfillan has a deep feeling for, and understanding of the western grasslands, which give both dignity and a deep historical sense to our sometimes forgotten heartland.Gilfillan's sense of the land encompasses the plants, wildflowers, and small creatures; the birds that he writes such wonderfully detailed descriptions about; the rivers, watering holes, and butteframed vistas; and, very importantly, the legacy of the Plains tribes of Native Americans who loved this land and fashioned myth and legend about it. By overlaying these myths onto the modern plains landscape, Gilfillan invokes a poignant sense of loss, yet we are also ennobled by the profound sense of the landscape that his vision imparts to us. Gilfillan is a tour guide like no other. His readers are given lovely, lingering descriptions of the overlooked and forgotten, the out-of-the-way and underfoot.

About this title

Review:

The Lakota word for bluebird, writes High Plains poet Gilfillan, is a verb meaning something like "to pass by all in blue." Gilfillan turns the endless hazy vistas of Wyoming, Colorado, and the Dakotas into verbs all their own, populating them with crows, magpies, meadowlarks, passing clouds--and always with stories derived from history and from his own travels. He is especially drawn to buttes, river bottoms, and sandy ridges, the difficult landscapes that "house and shelter the talisman and nurturing myth, the taproot metaphysics of any geography." Visiting places like Turtle Mountain, Devil's Lake, and Heart River, Gilfillan offers fine tribute to a little-heralded corner of the world. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Merrill Gilfillan is the author of "Magie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains" which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for non fiction, "Sworn Before Cranes," a collection of short stories that won the Ohio Book Award and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and, most recently, "Burnt House to Paw Paw: Applachian Notes," along with some half-dozen books of poetry. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

About this edition

• Publisher: Johnson Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1555662277
• ISBN 13: 9781555662271
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 127