Troutwatching by Dallas Crow

The best way to watch for trout is to peer past the top of the water to the darker edges of river, creek, or stream. The keen-eyed, knotty, and beautifully plainspoken missives in Troutwatching do all this and more. On page after page, Troutwatching searches for mysteries that “dart to the surface” but return time and again to a “mottled bottom”— or any place one calls home. Crow’s speaker is a self-proclaimed “sucker for a highway, / a gravel road, the siren song of elsewhere, / of nowhere, of in between.” He directs our gaze to the miracles alive in shallow, clear waters, and to marvel in a day the color of rain.  Troutwatching is a book of the everyman, of a lust for a certain lonesome wandering, even as it hungers for connection. Its poems live in gritty towns and anxious winds, in the stinging sand, in lilacs, lupine, and in the silent, thistle-strewn yards of rusted cars. Sketched out of America’s lost dreams, at this book’s heart is a glorious, gruff hope.

–Bonnie Jill Emanuel, author of Glitter City.

Dallas Crow writes with detail and emotional clarity about those he holds close, the joys and griefs and second guesses of mid-life, the pull toward something larger. A son grows up and away from him. A friend’s marriage falls apart. But beyond the domestic circle, the speaker knows the north wind is an old friend. He knows the vastness of the west offers both mystery and balm. The fishing may not have been good that day in Big Sky, but the troutwatching any time is fine. “Of the two kinds of loneliness, this is the good one.”

–Richard Robbins, author of The Oratory of All Souls