About the Book
George Kalamaras's The Rain That Doesn't Reach the Ground is the latest installment of the poet's forty-five year history with the American West: from having lived in Fort Collins, Colorado, full-time during most of the 1980s, to living an hour northwest in Livermore (near the Wyoming border) many summers since, to spending a summer in Big Timber, Montana, on the trail of locales visited by his belovèd Richard Hugo, to retiring from teaching in Indiana after thirty-two years and living six months a year in both Indiana and Colorado, to-finally-pulling up stakes in Indiana and settling full-time back in Colorado at 7,600 feet in elevation on Green Mountain in Livermore. This enduring embrace of Colorado and the West has lent Kalamaras perspective not only on his adopted homeland but also on the significance of his Indiana roots, a landscape some might think pales in comparison but to Kalamaras offers the experience of the rich animal life and Indiana woodlands he adores as entrée into a deeper relationship with the natural world in Colorado. Like his poems about hound dogs, The Rain That Doesn't Reach the Ground delves into some of the poet's most personal and intimate reflections on life, spirit, the wisdom of animals, and living in harmony with one's surroundings. This book is a meditation on place-whether it be a region one is preparing to leave or a place one has begun to inhabit with ever-deepening attention.
Sample:
Driving Across the Great Plains
And each small town. Each small town
keeps crawling me back, carving itself
through itself. Cutting into the Indiana tree bark
of my bones as a supposed way home.
Say I call out every day, by God, to myself.
Say I'm lost like the sound of gravel
in the shallows. Say I am the texture of wind
in the mouth, slowly easing out
back unto the world. The sun. The sun comes up
across these plains. The moon bleeds back the night.
Flakes of snow keep saying Colorado,
even as I pass-miles and miles east-
Nebraska towns like Sidney and Broken Bow.
I've called. Called out to the dead.
I've called and combed my voice
over and again through the buffalo
grass. Rolled it, mud-blotched, into the river bottom
where all things are beautifully said. Sad.
Where the wind goes slack in evening
lanterns lit by moths. I didn't feel
things. Didn't feel the earth
for a long time. Still, I kept driving west,
past Ogallala and Julesburg, telling myself
the mountains would surely stop me.
And I felt whinges of wind, both behind me
and before, mimicking me as I clenched
with each breath I took to reassure myself
I had done my best. That I had done
all I possibly could. That the cottonwoods
each autumn fed the North Platte
bags of their brilliant gold. That the land I was eating
was eating me with each mile
I pursued, each leaf somehow falling
into me and through.
About the Author :
George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016), is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years. He is the author of twenty-six collections of poetry-seventeen full-length books and nine chapbooks. He has also published a critical study on Western language theory and the Eastern wisdom traditions, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence (State University of New York Press, 1994). He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, the most recent of which is the 2024 Indiana Book Award for Poetry for his 2023 book from Dos Madres Press, To Sleep in the Horse's Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me. George and his wife, writer Mary Ann Cain, have nurtured beagles in their home for thirty years, first Barney, then Bootsie, and now Blaisie. George, Mary Ann, and Blaisie have been dividing their time between Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Livermore, Colorado, in the mountains northwest of Fort Collins. They have recently completed a move and are now living full-time in Livermore, Colorado.
Review :
George Kalamaras's new book is a love song for the West, his adopted home country, but a darkly, exuberantly complicated and far-reaching one, packed with close observation, deep knowledge of history and natural history, and linguistic fireworks-not to mention a profound love and respect for the region and its creatures, human and otherwise. These expansive poems are enriched by years of experience, immersion in the landscapes of Colorado and the region, and fellow travelers of the best sort (William Stafford, Georgia O'Keeffe, Kenneth Rexroth, and a host of others). By turns elegiac, celebratory, and visionary, this generous collection takes us on a rich, rewarding journey through Western landscapes and Kalamaras's extraordinary imagination.
-Jeff Gundy, author of Wind Farm: Landscape with Stories and Towers
George Kalamaras is the consummate poet of reverence. The Rain That Doesn't Reach the Ground is his most directly personal collection to date. Kalamaras deftly immerses us in a range of places, seasons, and times, revealing that we are part of something mysterious, beautiful, and threatening. These poems range from elation, "The moon's sorrow nearly topples you with joy," to lamentation, "How long can our bodies hang on / to the desire to hold the moon in our throat?" A whisper of autumnal feeling imbues these sturdy trusting prayers that dig deeply into the earth, the sky, the imagination, the bones of the body. Kalamaras honors the art of poetry, elevating our oneness with all beings, human and animal, alive now and before in the world.
-Sheila E. Murphy, author of Permission to Relax
