HORSETHIEF MEADOWS: The Collected Poems of Alex Leavens

$22.99

 

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

 

 

 

 

Description

HORSETHIEF MEADOWS: The Collected Poems of Alex Leavens

Eric le Fatte and Bruce Parker, Editors

Full-length Paper, ONE LAST WORD PROGRAM
$22.99
979-8-88838-342-1
2023
Alex Alan Leavens, was born on July 30, 1975 and raised in Portland, Oregon, as a fourth- generation Oregonian, whose great-grandfather arrived in 1895. He developed his interest in the outdoors as a child, and attended Prescott College in Arizona, where he lived for a year in a wickiup he designed and built. He also attended the Boulder Outdoor Survival School, which led him to start two businesses: the Old Federal Ax Company and the Oregon School of Survival and Tracking. He taught skills ranging from making primitive pottery of the Anasazi tradition to animal track identification. He also served as a firefighter in Arizona, southern California, and the Olympic National Park.

Alex later received a Bachelors degree in English Literature at Portland State University, where he graduated summa cum laude. He honed his craftsmanship skills at properties he and his family owned in Portland, volunteered at the Portland Museum of Art, became an expert baker and charcuterist, and hunted and fished throughout the Oregon backcountry. He also began writing–first a novel, The Border, and then poems infused with his devotion to craftsmanship, art, and a unique perspective on nature. In just a few years, Alex published numerous poems in literary magazines, including Cathexis Northwest, Cirque, Clover, The Ekphrastic Review, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Montana Mouthful, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Perceptions Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, and Windfall. Sadly, as his career as a poet began to flourish, Alex Leavens died by suicide on August 13, 2021. The poems he left behind are gathered here.

–Eric le Fatte

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