HORSETHIEF MEADOWS: The Collected Poems of Alex Leavens

As with John Haines, Alaska’s poet of the wild, or Gary Snyder, Alex Leavens is a poet of deep ecology.  His posthumous collection, Horsethief Meadows, brings poems of reverence, wisdom and precision in observation of the natural world, as with these lines: “…the mountain lion had the same tint as the moon ….” With felt grief as wildfires burn out of control, Leavens observes that “flames climb into treetops to ferry substances, no longer bound to earth…”

–Sandra L. Kleven, publisher/editor, CIRQUE: A Literary Journal, and Cirque Press

In the work of the late Alex Leavens, the reader finds compelling poetry of place with a poet who serves as guide and teacher to the backcountry Pacific Northwest. But also found in his poems is a student of witness: we experience the “behaviors and talents of the cold,” see tracks of bears “that won’t heal over,” admire a “thin, wet brush” of a mink at “that lake nobody knows.” With maturity and métier, Alex held a steady gaze over difficult landscapes of harsh seasons, centuries of human intervention, and increasingly, traumatically, fire.

–John Miller, author of Olympic

The poems in Alex Leavens’ collection, Horsethief Meadows, measure the human against the “circumference of the world.” Leavens’ narrator is a shapeshifter moving through that world, helping us to remember we are all one: “and the wind/ found its way down/ into the dry mouth of the badger’s sett,/ down into the earth/ to remind the grove/ to stay joined/ at the root,/ to speak as one living thing.” In poetry “equal to the horizon,/ equal to the morning sun,” Leavens puts us there at the center of things—circling with the hawk overhead, wandering with the cougar down through a streambed, or sunning our wings with the butterfly. A lyric work of interconnectedness between the human and the natural worlds, Leavens’ poems burn like a fire, showing us the way in “that small matter/ of living/ at the center/ of the dark.”

–Peter Grandbois, author of Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years