The Voice of the Borderlands

Drum Hadley’s poems, said Allen Ginsberg, are “like time and death.” Gathering forty years of Hadley’s work, this extraordinary collection ranges from powerful lyrics to droll Western “haiku”: A Long Day’s Ride”My horse looks smaller than it did when I left.” It also commemorates one man’s richly eventful career as a poet, rancher, and dedicated conservationist. A friend and literary associate of writers including Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, Hadley is a poet of and for the land he has helped to preserve: “Wash me along the rims of arroyo rocks, Carry the dust, carry the sands, Carry these words, my seeds, Down these blue desert valleys, away.”