evada! No one would argue that historically Nevada has played an essential role as a “frontier” state. As Richard Shelton states in the forward to Shaun T. Griffin's wonderfully rich anthology “Desert Wood: An Anthology of Nevada Poets” written in 1990, “The American frontier, as defined by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, was ‘the meeting point between savagery and civilization.’ But a generation of recent western historians have challenged this view and contend that there were many frontiers in the West, often overlapping, and some of them continue to exist today.”
Even today in 2008, Nevada poets struggle with acceptance and support, both as artists and educators, when seen in relation to the state's total population and economy.
They struggle to survive, living externally on the edge of the beautiful high desert expanses and mountains and internally with what Sheldon describes as the “strained circumstances and limitations demanded by a frontier.” Nevada poets write about deserts —spiritual, physical and the space between, “the everyday deserts of boredom, frustration, and despair — all with which we have had some experience.
They write with a clear definition of the individual, a clearly marked landscape, and they have a strong sense of isolation, both from people in other places and within their own “personal landscape.”
Thus, this anthology represents “frontier literature,” a human story of living on the edge.
The poets warrant recognition and remembrance for their significance, and the poems capture for us our heritage, our imagination and what remains of our familiarity. A good read any day! Let me introduce you to three of the poets and their works:
Irene Bruce (1903-1987) came to Nevada from Texas in 1936. She founded the Reno Poetry Workshop in the 1940s, conducted a poetry program on KOH radio, and was poetry editor of “Nevada Magazine.” She died in abject poverty.

Virginia City, Nevada

The contrived glamour of tourists
Glitters palely into this sudden village,
Finding dregs of history scattered obscurely
over the rim of a high mountain canyon.
The travelers shiver as the sun stares at them bleakly,
And the tip of the wind catches their garments.

Images here are seldom seen
Through pity-taunting eyes of tourists;—
For while they dip lightly into quarter history,
Jerking the handles of coin-famished machines,
The embers of dust are stirring
The deeds of men whose deaths
Laugh at their modern gestures.

Harold Witt (1923-1995) moved from Nevada in the 1980s, but Nevada always held a vital place in his poetry.
A friend of Irene Bruce, whom he met while living in a camp for conscientious objectors at Galena Creek during World War II, he later became the reference librarian for the Washoe County Library and author of eleven books and recipient of numerous prizes for his poetry.

Pyramid

The desert cries with gulls, the dry is wet—
In violence like this, disciples might
Toss and toss until toward their boat
A raying savior walked through wests of light.
Then radiance of aftermath might lap
shores like these, pelicans resurrect
and, where swans slide too, farfetchingly flap
beaks, wings, webs, applauding their own éclat.
Beside weird shapes of tufa where they slept,
Snakes might unwind and faintly castanet,
Cui-uis leap through lavenders of quiet,
the purple pyramid turn to burning red—
Marvelous loaves, and water into wine,
Infinities of fin where none had swum—
Miracles as likely as this shine and shadow-shattered coming of the night
To such a lake, a place where nature seems
—raying with changing ranges, window-lined—
symbolic splendor; suspending disbelief,
we walk the Christ-calmed mirrors of that deep.

Bill Cowee (1942- ) moved to Mound House, Nevada in 1985. A founding member of the Ash Canyon Poets of Carson City and for two years a principle organizer of the Western Mountain Writer’s Conference attracting over three hundred people, his poetry has a voice of its own. His work has appeared in several magazines and reviews.
This year he generously donated his remarkable collection of over 1,000 volumes of Nevada writers to Western Nevada College. Poetry has been his nighttime preoccupation, but by day he works as an accountant in Mound House.

Meeting Gandhi on the Markleeville Road

Beneath the cloud-spewing mountains
driven by wind-gusted breath
the uprooted brush tumbles,
tangles along the fence line.
Wild grass grown thick
rustles on hidden ditch lines,
broadens to pheasant freeways
in the aging Sierra autumn.

Green hay is baled and stacked;
fields now smooth fresh sheets
washed and spread with anticipation
of winter's first heavy snow.

Near the field’s marshy end
handful of granite boulders lie,
headstones scattered in a graveyard
where fingers of an Ice Age glacier

slipped their burden and expired.
Further, in a fallow field near Minden,
astride the freeway easement,
stands a massive cottonwood

watching a new roadbed travel south
toward the ringed target in its trunk.
I think of Gandhi, sitting resolutely
on the tracks of the Calcutta railway,

passively in the path of England.
As yellow flowers and Gandhi’s ashes
once floated slowly down the Ganges,
leaves fall, tumbling along old asphalt.