Böcker av Ron McFarland

The teacher assigns her fourth-grade students to write "poems as lovely as trees," and they go at it, these students whose aspirations are a display board at the county fair. Young Ron McFarland takes the subject to heart, and from his pencil unfurl leaves, sturdy branches, sunlight between the branches, possibly fruit and a wayward kite, and most certainly a nest in which birds burst with song. McFarland, in this and previous collections, goes far beyond trees. I see McFarland coloring the world, a sort of John Constable, beginning with trees and then with tenderness and art making it all come alive.- Gary Soto, author of New and Selected Poems, a National Book Award Finalist, and One Kind of FaithIf you were to sit down with Ron McFarland (kitchen counter, seminar table, barstool), you would soon understand that he knows a very great deal about a whole lot of things and can talk about any of them with savvy and erudition, mostly disguised as plain talk. The experience is not a whole lot different from reading A Variable Sense of Things, his latest book of poems. Sometimes wry, sometimes downright funny; sometimes elegiac, sad, or rueful, and always, always smart. They do not strain, these poems. They are wise. They mean exactly what they say, and more.- Robert Wrigley, author of Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems and The True Account of Myself As A BirdIntensely personal poems, studded with unexpected ironies like grace notes, which illuminate the depth below the surface.- Mary Clearman Blew, author of Think of Horses

In a 1995 interview, prolific Chicano writer Gary Soto noted, ""Wonderment has always been a part of my life."" This book surveys Soto's immense range of poems, stories, novels, essays and plays for audiences of prereaders to adults. Soto's world moves from the cotton and beet fields of the San Joaquin Valley to the blue-collar barrios of Fresno, and to urban and suburban settings in Oakland and Berkeley. Chapters analyze a wide variety of Soto titles, from his breakout works like 1977's The Elements of San Joaquin to the Chato the Cat illustrated books for children. With self-deprecating humor, particularly in his poems, Soto combines his wonderment with the trials and conflicts that beset him throughout life. In such novels as Jesse, Buried Onions and The Afterlife, and in his stories for YA readers, including Baseball in April and Petty Crimes, his broad array of characters confront the anxieties and annoyances of adolescence. Although he continues to motivate young Chicanos to read and write, Soto stakes his greatest claims to literary prominence through his poems, which are accessible to readers of all ages.

Lieutenant Colonel Edward J. Steptoe's near miraculous escape from encirclement by 1,000 Northern Plateau Indians in 1858 is a familiar story from the Indian Wars. This definitive biography of Steptoe chronicles his career. His personal letters reveal a thoughtful, sensitive commander who came to question his choice of career even before his final battle.

Focuses on ten memoirs from the northern US Rockies, including Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. This study compares memoirs representing states that share similar demographic, ecological, and socio-economic characteristics, to reveal both commonalities and divergences among American Western memoirs.

Generations of readers have accepted the call of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to join his heroine Evangeline in her search for Gabriel, the lover she was separated from during the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. This title presents history of the poem that describes its reception that followed the 1847 release.