Heart of the Prairie

Heart of the Prairie is both a necessary call to save a fragile ecosystem, as well as a reminder that poetry can become a type of lyrical memoir. His work captures the daily beauty and hardship of ranching life from the frost of a windless day, to watching a gopher, to finding meadowlarks frozen in a snowbank, to the hard work of having to shoot a sickly bull-'I find myself saying "I'm sorry,"/ as I touch off the rounds."' Told with a hawk's clear eye and a generous heart, Roseland invites us onto his land, he shows us the wide horizon of decades, and he laments the vanishing grasslands. Heart of the Prairie is a nurturing of words that tells the story of weathered hands tending weathered, beloved, earth. - Patrick Hicks,