Merrill Gilfillan, Undanceable

With exuberance and economy, Merrill Gilfillan's Undanceable evokes the landscape of the American West through the geographic word. Place names, the texture of speech, and a certain aroma of nature permeate these pages. Ever alert to unforeseen connections, Gilfillan follows both eye and ear, his poems unfolding at the pace of consciousness.

A faint breeze

in the old swallow dens. A man
mounts a mare. And the roughlegs,
maculate riders, imperial

boreal tilt
and tack, wiser than owls,
drift disdainfully south.