Cattails and Sagebrush

Stories abound in this book, and a river runs through it.

The stories are random and recurring, like memory itself. Family history. A conversation struck up with an old man in a bar. A long ago Pony League team undefeated. A young marine walking in an empty baseball field in Oahu, reading his college acceptance letter. The stories, like the cue balls Pearn describes in another poem, touch each other and change trajectories.

The river is the Poudre - born in the Rocky Mountains, eastern slope, flowing through Fort Collins. Pearn gives his readers its colors and its creatures in many lights and seasons. Like memory, it is a place to return to, a source of renewal.

There is another force moving these poems, one not found so much in contemporary writing. Call it boundless hope. In his poem "Three Square Meals," Pearn says he "did not have the American dream" because he never wanted to be rich; he just wanted to be a writer. But the American dream is writ large in these poems - true grit and work and the possibility of glory in baseball fields and boot camp - and in poetry. Many of the poems in this book are conversations with poetry and poets that begin in a seventh-grade classroom and are now part of his outlook and his art.

The American dream shines in Pearn's memories of Jacksonville, Illinois, in the good days of the 1950s and 60s when there was work in huge and colorful variety for anyone who was willing to do it. But he also tells some 21st centuries stories of hope and struggle. His wife, a recent immigrant from China, confronts the gulf between her education and the jobs available to her. They walk the bureaucratic maze in their efforts to bring her son to the United States.

This is a book to read and return to.

-Peggy Sower Knoepfle