Away from the Road

An incomparable poet of the American West, Stephens evokes a primordial place, one met with only in the great poems of Native Americans and the ancient Chinese and Japanese. His rhythm and words are spare, evoking the clear, dry-air vision of the ordinary. Stephens writes about the Colorado plains of his youth and the landscape of Southern California, imagery of the subtropical and the desert--oriental, mundane, and mediterranean. Going beyond the Homeric catalog, beyond a Whitmanesque list, "Names of Trout Flies" meditates on the deep interior of the West.