Blurb:
At age twenty-five Richard Shelton moved from Texas to southern Arizona (Tucson), where he has lived ever since, teaching literature courses at the University of Arizona and writing book after book of his perceptions and responses to the desert climate and terrain he has called his "chosen place." Shelton is now an inveterate Southwesterner, with deep, often spiritual affinity for the rocks and saguaro cactus of the desert, the mountains, the sea one hundred miles below him in the Gulf of California. These are his usual subjects in the many books he has written since his first publication, Journal of Return. The sea and desert are the extremes of his personal mythology. They frame the earth for him, an earth of silences, of ghostly night animals, of rocks that exchange brief whispers about the moon on nights of the long dry season. Tucson is ringed with mountains, the Tucson Mountains, Mount Lemmon, Mica Mountain, and others, and they are a third dimension of nature for him, an urge of nature to thrust up into the sky, a dream of the rocks that lie scattered on the desert floor. The night sky is a brilliance of immense stars in Shelton's poems, under which dark, quiet, sometimes desperate lives are endured.
