PINYON REVIEW 19, SPRING 2021, LIMITED EDITION

Chenier, a glass piece by Karen Bourque

This pocket-sized literary and art journal is another hand-sewn treasure produced by talented Susan Entsminger, editor/publisher of Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado. Susan, who began her artistic work alongside her husband, Gary Entsminger, (deceased) a decade or more ago, has continued designing and producing unique poetry and art books since Gary’s death. She has expanded this independent press's list to include international writers, photographers, and artists.

Susan has added poetry to her painting, drawing, and design repertoire in this issue of Pinyon Review 19 with an introductory poem entitled “Cured.” As I read the poem, I imagined the voice of my former editor (Gary) speaking to Susan: “She only heard/one message from the other side/he said, do not waste your joy/Sun on snow… Crows kept calling on the telephone wire/long after she had forgotten his number…” While reading author bios in this issue of Pinyon Review, I also discovered that Susan has been publishing poetry in Mudfish, Main Street Rag, and SAL. As I read, I envisioned Gary agreeing that she hasn’t “wasted her joy.”

In this hand-sewn edition, the poets Susan showcased  include renowned Luci Shaw, whose “Wishing Flower” is a poignant verse featuring a small child who observes “…dandelions proliferated enough/to cover the field with a tablecloth of gold/stars blowing in the wind…” Shaw, a long-time contributor to Pinyon, is Writer in Residence at Regent College, Vancouver, and received the 2013 Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing.

I’ve had sporadic correspondence with the poet, Chuck Taylor, former Creative Writing Coordinator at Texas A&M who operates Free Slough Press. Chuck, also an accomplished photographer, contributed four lovely nature photographs, “Seeing More Than You See,” in this issue of Pinyon Review. He showcases his photographic work through shows in galleries, literary magazines, and on the web.

My dear friend, Karen Bourque, contributed a glass rendering of Ridges, my recent book of poetry and Don Thornton’s paintings published by Pinyon. The art piece features chenieres of Louisiana that publisher Susan describes as “vivid, visceral paintings.” Karen used stained glass, Apache tear, and kyanite to create her portrayal of the chenieres. It’s an arresting art piece that accompanies selected poems from Ridges, my book Susan will release in May.

Four haiku by Gary Hotham, a long-time contributor to Pinyon Publishing, will delight readers of “Dark Matters, ” a quartet about “early stars/fireflies changing/places.” Hotham is the Vice-President of the Haiku Society of America and has received several book awards for his haiku contributions.

As I said earlier, Pinyon #19 is a treasure created by Susan Entsminger, from the cover art and design of the High Country, Ouray Colorado to the last untitled poem by Simon Perchik “…in ashes, making room on the stove/in rest by a river/where there was none before.”

Limited Edition. Order through Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403

 

PINYON REVIEW #18, FALL 2020

I wish that Gary Entsminger, former editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing, had lived to see Pinyon Review #18, the journal he and his wife Susan birthed during his lifetime. This latest special journal with hand sewn Japanese Stab Binding on Mohawk Loop Inkwell Vellum EcoWhite Paper is a limited edition dedicated to Stuart Friebert. The work of Friebert, poet and translator of international fame, first appeared in Pinyon Publishing’s inventory with the award-winning book, Floating Heart, and his work remained a constant contribution to the publications of Pinyon until his death this year.

Susan Entsminger, now editor and publisher of Pinyon Review, introduced this special edition with a brief poem of her own entitled “Perspective,” and voiced the lament that the “sequences” in her life, “which had become as sacred as ritual” are no longer (referring, perhaps, to the sudden death of her beloved husband, Gary.) However, she also speaks of “staying suspended in the universe,” a phrase attributed to the poet, XIA Haitao, whose work appears in this issue of Pinyon Review.

Some of the outstanding authors who have appeared in former issues of Pinyon and whose books have been published by this independent press include Chuck Taylor, Luci Shaw, Martha McFerren, and Neil Harrison. However, more recent poets such as XIA Haitao will transport readers into vistas overlooking the sea from the summit of Mount Tai in China and from which Susan Entsminger derived the line, “Only when you stay suspended in the universe,” in her introduction to this issue of Pinyon Review. During this time of Covid-19, the particular line that resonated with me and inspired me to read further was XIA Haitao’s long poem covering almost ten pages about a mountain that “has been standing/ since 2.4 billion years ago/in silence as if nothing has ever happened/to him.” It’s a tribute poem that illustrates the lastingness of both geographical formations and poetry, and the appearance of Chinese script, side by side with the poem enhances the format of the translation and contributes to the international flavor of this artistic journal published in southern Colorado.

I loved the imagery about a Religious figure in Mark Mitchell’s “Past,” in lines like “…Relics lack/substance, but they can grow real again. She/kept holy cloths handy in case someone/happened past her room — they must never see/through the spells she’d been taught by evil nuns…” The imagery reminded me of supernatural inhabitants in the works of New Orleans author Anne Rice’s works about other world spirits. Mitchell’s poem is brief but is a powerful evocation of the “also world,” which a Religious friend calls the afterlife.

Maria Roca’s contribution of “It’s Always Windy in Portbou,” translated from the Catalan by Sonia Alland and formatted side by side with the Portuguese version, features more of Susan’s placement of multilingual renditions and is a gusty lyric that “pushes a train car over and it falls on the tracks like an enormous dead animal…blows with sudden blasts…everyone tousled with hair blown backwards or forwards…” The poem will remind Louisiana readers of the furious hurricanes that beset Acadian residents in Louisiana each year. Powerful phrasing that describes“windows trembling and beds shaking," may be traumatic for southern Louisianans, but the translation redeems itself with the line that concludes “everything [is] purified by the wind.” However, as a part-time Louisiana resident, I would venture that we’d rather not experience that form of redemption,

A special section by Richard Kent is another example of Pinyon’s photographic surprises. Kent introduces ‘Lessons in Recursion’ in which a recursive image of a scene captured in photography may alter a viewer’s perspective of an ordinary landscape. When Kent encounters blank wooden signs in which messages have been erased by wear and time, he creates “recursive progressions” or transformations of place by photographing landscape scenes and placing the images on blank signs, some of which might startle viewers as they travel through various states. Seven signs showcase his complex photographic representations, several of which are attached to trees throughout the US.

As usual, this Pinyon Review #18 is a small masterpiece, a volume that will invite new readers and delight old ones as well. This edition is a wonderful tribute to Stuart Friebert and to the Entsmingers for preserving outstanding literary and artistic contributions. It contains some of the creative output of our country’s best word and visual artists.

Copies available through links above or snail mail from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

 

PINYON REVIEW #15

Approximately nine years ago, I met a handsome black Labrador Retriever through photographs with accompanying text by Gary and Susan Entsminger, co-publishers of Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado. The Entsmingers sent me pictures of this lovely dog perched on mountain slopes and rocky ledges and standing in fields of wildflowers. One cover of Pinyon Review showed Garcia dressed in red jacket and matching red collar in a forest of yellow-leafed aspens, his head turned as if looking back toward his admiring owners. He was the dog of a breed I wish I could own but because of allergies to animal dander, cannot. So I owned Garcia vicariously and felt deep loss when he recently died during a harsh winter.

Three photographs of Garcia taken by Susan Entsminger appear in the latest issue of Pinyon Review, along with several poems featuring him; e.g., “Afterglow:” in which Susan describes her fondness for this canine companion that climbed mountain trails with her and Gary: “If I can I will/criss-cross those snowy woods/for eternity with you…walking into low late-day winter sun/maybe that’s what the light of afterlife feels like /blinding brightness soothing dreamy eyes/[I] felt I could walk straight into it/drawing us up the gentle slope to the cabin/slowly to coax our breathing calm/still you’d gallop in the last/to Gary waiting with a treat/three proud hearts bursting/like a flash of summer sun/sparking the heart of winter.”

Almost at Garcia’s heels in this fifteenth issue, photographs of Mark Sanders’ work of oils on canvas at Blue Creek in Nebraska appear. They represent artwork that Sanders rendered of the Nebraska Sandhills. Also, an oil on gesso over plywood entitled “Fireflies” shows Sanders’ range of painting talent — not to be eclipsed by his writing — his non-fiction biography, The Weight of the Weather: Regarding the Poetry of Ted Kooser, won the 2018 Nebraska Book Award. Sanders’ use of orange, yellow and blue color combinations feature brush strokes reminiscent of Van Gogh — he appears to use palette knives in his depictions of the harsh faces of both winter and spring in Nebraska. 

As I have been reading and observing the ballooning egos of artists and writers in our present culture, the poem of Scott Wiggerman in “Self Portrait As Collage,” spoke to my feelings about the narcissism rampant in the so-called “Academy of Poets” today: “You are still stuck on being an I,/as I was before I lost myself. Can/you hear how I am barely a murmur/of my former self? I, torn and broken,/in hundreds of pieces, learned to master/the art of assemblage. Like all art, it/was the stuff of trial and effort; it was/a matter of rearranging the no-longer I.” This brief but cogent verse is a brilliant assessment of practicing the art of egolessness.

Robert Elliott continues his work restoring and archiving glass plate photographic images of Yosemite National Park and California Missions from the early 20th century. In this issue of Pinyon Review, he and Susan Entsminger contributed photographs of Harold Taylor’s “Meeting of the Waters” featuring digital scans of the glass plates of Overhanging Rock, Half Dome Overlooking Tenaya Canyon, Mt. Lyell, and Vernal Fall below Emerald Pool. Taylor’s sister, Winifred, hand-painted prints made from his glass plate negatives. This restoration work by Elliott, who lived near Yosemite for over 45 years, is also featured in 5 x 7 greeting cards published by Pinyon Publishing. The legend on one of Elliott’s reproductions relates how Taylor walked all the trails carrying an 8 x 10 camera, tripod, and glass plates “and would often outwalk the mules.”

Luci Shaw’s many readers will welcome a return of her poetry in this issue of Pinyon Review. “Incoming Tides” focuses on the act of writing and ends in an evaluation struggling poets often make of their poetic contributions: “…By beauty/we may not mean perfection.” In “Rhythms,” she speaks of the balance we strive to achieve as we grow older, sharing the wisdom that overarches most of her work: “We need this steadiness, this/faithfulness, in realities we/have learned to welcome. Like rains/in a dry season. Like the way/every night we are content,/eager to creep/under the fringes of sleep.” Shaw, an accomplished poet and essayist, is Writer-in-Residence at Regent College, Vancouver and received the 2013 Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing.

Gary Entsminger focuses on feet in “Sandals” that carry “waves of energy” [that] rise from the ground/into the soles/of our feet/a friendly charge/ from Gaia/but we usually retreat/into hard resistance/shoes that neutralize/the vibrations…[but]Indians knew/to walk in harmony/in moccasins/letting the vibrations/from their feet/alert the snakes/to slither elsewhere/feel the earth/from the soles/into the soul…” As a hiker and a mountain climber, Entsminger knows how to care for his feet so that he can achieve those peak moments while ascending rocky ground — fodder for his philosophy, poetry, and artwork. He's presently working on another book of poetry, and I’d put money on the fact that he’s probably working sans shoes of any kind this moment.

Of interest to followers of Stuart Friebert is a paper he presented at AWP Panel in Portland, Oregon this spring, celebrating an anniversary of Field magazine of which he was a founding editor at Oberlin College, Ohio. The Field magazine has featured such notables as Anne Sexton and Denise Levertov, and under Friebert’s guidance, The Field Translation Series developed. Friebert produced 14 volumes of translations in this series. His paper about the inception of Field magazine will be followed by a forthcoming article concerning the birth of the translation series. In Pinyon Review #15, Friebert also writes a memoir about his association with Michael Mann, son of the famed German author, Thomas Mann. A prolific writer who owes allegiance to no genre of literature, his eclectic work is often showcased in Pinyon Review.

Self translations of work by Chinese poets Ye Rugang, Yin Xiaoyuan, and Lang Tianya, and other international writers are included in this latest issue of Pinyon Review. 

Order this fulsome literary journal of high quality work from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

THUMBPRINT IN THE CLAY

In 2014 I reviewed a book entitled Adventure of Ascent: Field Notes From A Lifelong Journey by Luci Shaw, an account of a woman getting older that recorded the challenges and opportunities of “the stages of aging and as a mountain-climbing experience.” A few days ago I received another book entitled Thumbprint in the Clay by Shaw in which she explores the idea of finding thumbprints in creation – explorations in faith, art, and creativity. She discovers God’s presence in “imprinted adventures" and records, in essays and poetry,  her awareness of the Creator in her physical surroundings and in “living clay.”

Her ruminations about poetry and its imprint on humans speak to me as she writes that our senses allow us to observe, sort out and differentiate, and poetry brings them into clearer focus. Shaw’s delight in the ordinary is contagious. She devotes an entire chapter to coffee mugs, hand-thrown pottery such as fruit bowls, salad bowls and jugs, trays – vessels for storing, serving, holding and pouring. Each of her vessels have a history, but it is the look and feel of their shape and texture that enchant her, “combining earth and human eye and muscle with individual design, skill, and intense heat…” Fascinated with the art of pottery making, Shaw once enrolled in a ceramics class and found that manipulating clay on the wheel was sensuously satisfying. She refers to each of the pieces of clay she has collected as “examples of a kind of incarnation – a unique physical expression of the potter’s skill and artistry…a reflection of the artist’s soul… embodied in the individual’s creation…”

In an outstanding chapter of Thumbprint in the Clay, Shaw focuses on “Beauty,” and covers terrain showing God’s thumbprint that has always inspired me – the landscape of Big Sur, California.  At a monastery high on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Shaw spent retreat time to recover after assiduously pursuing her writing career. She felt unsatisfied because she had experienced a disconnect with her spiritual life; however, in the monastery she gained fresh insight and was able to open herself to wisdom from beyond, finding God’s imprint in her surroundings that pointed her back to him…and to her work.

Shaw encountered Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and was provided with an elemental example for enlarging her contemplative life. While she and Rohr sat at a table, gazing out a dining hall window and focusing on a poplar tree in front of them, Rohr told her that he could sit for hours and contemplate the tree. “‘Those leaves. Even that one leaf in particular’ (he points). He suggests to me that when my mind complicates or questions what I believe, I might choose an object – rock, leaf, a pool of water – for quiet contemplation. When your mind wanders, as it will, return to focusing on what is there in front of you. Let your gaze stay with the awareness that God is in you and in this object that you are both part of a universe that is an ongoing creation of love. He called this a long, loving look at the real.” This chapter resonated with me and evoked my memory of sitting in a chair on the patio of a small motel in Sedona, Arizona, gazing up at the cliffs of red rock that mark this area. I sat there for several hours, in one of the most non-thinking times of my life, enfolded in the texture and color of this particular “thumbprint” and feeling at one with my surroundings.

One of the last chapters in Thumbprint in the Clay, “God-Printed People,” includes a portrait of Madeleine L’Engle, renowned author of children and young adult books, and both fiction and non-fiction books regarding the spiritual life. Shaw and her husband befriended L’Engle and published her first book of poetry, The Weather of the Heart, and Shaw writes of how a friendship burgeoned, despite differing theological views – L’Engle was a liberal, left-leaning Episcopalian, and Shaw was a conservative, right-leaning evangelical. “Somehow, [by] the grace of God, we met in the middle, learning much from each other, influencing each other and being enriched in the process,” Shaw writes. Later, Shaw Publishers became L’Engle’s publisher for eleven of her religious books. When L’Engle moved into a nursing home in Litchfield, Connecticut, Shaw flew out from Bellingham to see her and was dismayed that her author friend seemed locked into herself; however, a month later, she was able to connect with L’Engle before she died and wrote a poem honoring her, a poignant tribute to a woman who had created a lasting impression in the world of spiritual writing: “…Fog has rolled in,/erasing definition at the edge. Walking/to meet it, she hopes soon to see/where the shore ends. She listens as/the ocean breathes in and out in waves./She hears no other sound.”

Luci Shaw is an inspiring co-creator whose thumbprints in poetry and prose help readers to see the marks of beauty and inspiration everywhere in the Creation and to ruminate on the markings of human artistry and skill. She is the author of ten volumes of poetry and other books, and co-authored three books with Madeleine L’Engle. Her papers are housed in the Luci Shaw Collection at Wheaton College. She lives in Bellingham, Washington.  

   

PAINTING THE PINYON REVIEW

Years ago, I encountered a friend from New Iberia in a Barnes and Noble bookstore in Lafayette, Louisiana. He was standing before a rack of books, staring intently at the covers of books that he didn't bother to open. "Looking for something special?" I asked. He barely acknowledged me and continued to scrutinize the covers. As I'm curious about book lovers, I persisted. "What do you like to read?" He frowned, saying, "I never look for book authors or titles; I choose my books according to the color and design of the cover. If a cover attracts me, I buy the book. It's like opening a surprise package."

If my friend should see the latest cover of Pinyon Review #7, Celebrating the Arts and Sciences, he probably wouldn't look much further, and he'd be pleasantly surprised he had chosen a literary journal that would take him beyond the exterior of the publication. The vivid purple and green abstract design of the journal's cover rendered by Susan Elliott, co-publisher of Pinyon Review, is a real eye-catcher. Susan designs all of the Pinyon Review covers, but this one derives from an original painting she created as a watercolor background to accompany poems in Open the Gates, a book of animal-focused poetry by Dabney Stuart. And it's stunning!

"I pressed cellophane into the paint to create abstract designs which I incorporated into images representing forest, ocean, hot air balloon, sky, and land," Susan explains. "I worked on this set of watercolor backdrops while visiting friends in Jericho, Vermont. I recall spreading a dark purple sheet on their deck so I could splatter and splash with abandon. It was spring: birds and flowers popping out, choruses of spring peepers, long distance runs on forest trails..." (Readers will note that Susan's word pictures are as colorful as her actual paintings).

Susan says that two of the bird poems by Stuart needed a painting so she visited the Jericho Settler's Farm to buy eggs and asked if she could collect some chicken feathers. She then created "Quail" and "A Bird, But Who?" with swirling feathers in airy blue and ochre paintings. The dark blue-green and purple feather piece on the cover of Pinyon Review was also created that spring in Vermont. Susan brought it out of archival art boxes this year so that she could scan it, and after making a high-resolution scan of the piece, she enlarged the digital image just enough to emphasize the textures of the feathers and the play between watercolor pigments and rough watercolor paper.

           

Susan had a lot to say about the heavy, rough watercolor paper, which holds more paint (pigment plus water) in the textured grooves. "Normally, watercolor paint dries very quickly but with rough, heavy paper, you have more time to mix 'wet on wet'," Susan said. "This way, you can mix the colors on the paper and let them play together. When the water dries, there is more pigment concentrated in the grooves. The edges of the painting (which were masked with tape) also concentrate the pigment in beautiful patterns, as do the edges of the feather imprints." Voila! The cover of a literary journal that would have entranced my friend who judges books by their covers!

In addition, the Pinyon Review title page image, "Feather Jig," is a reconstruction of focal areas on the full painting. From the digital image, Susan extracted rectangles highlighting the play between paper, pigment, and feathers and arranged the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle-like design, which she described as jiggling "as much as they fit together, invoking a happy dance-like jig." The jig is reminiscent of Susan's personality—lighthearted with a lively dancing spirit.

Susan is what I'd call a "protean woman." She has formidable credentials with a B. S. in Botany and a B.S. in French from Humboldt State University and a Ph.D. in Biology from Dartmouth College, but today she concentrates on the artwork for Pinyon Publishing located on the Uncompahgre Plateau, adjacent to the San Juans of the southern Rocky Mountains. She paints, plays music, designs books, hikes, gardens, cooks, writes, and illustrates books. Her book credits include illustrations for Dabney Stuart's Open the Gates, drawings and paintings for Why Water Plants Don't Drown with Victoria I. Sullivan, and illustrations for Spilled Milk by Gary Hotham. She has co-authored Ophelia's Ghost, Fall of '33, Remembering the Parables and Making the Most of WriteitNow4 with Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing.

Inside the latest issue of Pinyon Review, readers will find the work of eighteen outstanding poets, a short story, and more art by Jay Friedenberg. Among the poets who have often appeared in this journal are four whose poems represent impassioned social experiences and emotional reflections, including a nostalgic piece by Gary Entsminger.

Gary, whose recent debut book of poetry was Two Miles West, takes readers through a "Wall of Sound" (an excerpt below) in the summer of 1974 when:

he traveled with the band wore tee shirt and blue jeans like
the other guys climbed scaffold to place speakers in the Wall of Sound happy
for the job, already beginning to understand none of this would happen
again...
[while] down front young women danced dresses gliding braless barefeet barely
touching the floor to Jack Straw China Cat Sunflower I Know You Rider
tell the folks back home this is the Promised Land callin'... 

The poem, reminiscent of the style of e.e. cummings and beat poets, is a toe-tapping, robust experience that causes the reader to want more of Entsminger's highly-charged poems. It begs to be read aloud with other people.

Michael Miller, winner of the 2014 Yeats Poetry Prize and author of Into This World and Lifelines, presents poems that underline the fears and sorrows of the human condition. "A Man Alone" captures a universal feeling of loneliness and existential awareness in such lines as 

At the feeder by his window
The rabbit nibbling the wet grass
At dawn in the small park where he waits
For the sun to rise above the shadowed hill. 

In "Fear," Miller's lyric is unrelenting as he articulates the familiarity of fear

in the night of the invisible scalpel,
In the bleeding end of the dark... 

Miller's poems are often startling insights into human vulnerability and reverberate with emotional power.

Luci Shaw, Writer-in-Residence at Regent College, Vancouver, received the 2013 Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing. Those who have entered their seventh and eighth decades of life will identify with "Green Season," a succinct, sharp poem using the ordinary image of a barn to articulate the onset of aging: 

I turn the pages like old barn doors
peering into the shadowed spaces and
stalled beasts, wondering if I am
a fiction in my own wrecked, weather-beaten
barn of a life. The smell of rich
horse sweat and dung. The life
shivering beneath their flanks...

In sharp contrast, she gives readers the pleasure of "Flowers in Winter:"

...Infect me with joy!"
Though I'm here, inside my house,
I trace with the stalks of my hands how resurrected I feel,
relishing through frosty glass the winter snow that
covers my crocus bulbs, my hyacinths.

Shaw's delight in the natural world invites readers to get on with things as she attends to the business of creating hope with her delightful poetic vision.

New Orleans born Ken Fontenot, who now lives in Austin Texas, won the 2012 Texas Institute of Letters Award for poetry, and his sense of humor often unleashes itself on more serious readers.  In "It Wants to Stay," his tongue-in-cheek observation about dust reminds readers of their mortality in a revelation of the inevitable within the ordinary:

We breathe
the almost nothingness of dust
which survives us all.
Its reappearance trick
takes its time, arriving finally
as a guest announced.
Just run your finger
over the coffee table.
A mote of dust
contains a mote of truth:
it has the last laugh.

This issue of Pinyon Review is a keeper and represents the best of art and poetry. You may want to frame Susan's cover. Copies of Pinyon Review #7 are available at amazon.com or order from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

THE FALL 2014 PINYON REVIEW

During the mid-20th century, "little magazines" began to burgeon in the U.S. Vital independent publishers emerged and have continued to proliferate since that time, and literary and art magazines have become an important part of the intellectual life throughout the country. The Pinyon Review, a journal birthed by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado, has joined this burgeoning movement and has a mission of producing quality literature, art, and scientific essays through the efforts of Gary Entsminger, Editor, and Susan Elliott, artist and Managing Editor of the magazine.

Although the Pinyon Review is a relative newcomer to the literary scene, it has gained distinction as a little magazine that nurtures an eclectic group of writers and artists from various parts of the U.S., ranging from Colorado to New York. The latest issue, #6, of the Review just arrived in my mailbox this morning, and I think that it's the best issue Gary and Susan have produced.

The lead poem in Pinyon Review #6, entitled "Why I Became A Vegetarian" by Barbara Schmitz, features the flower children, vegans, LSD users, and advocates of free love prevalent during the 1970's when young people felt threatened by ideas about the human race being annihilated by the "Big Bomb."

"Why I Became A Vegetarian" captures the essence of the hippy movement in 17 stanzas of masterful, descriptive lyrics narrated with tongue in cheek humor. "Because we read vegetarian cookbooks/like the Grub Bag with delicious recipes/like cucumbers in sour cream and essays/like the one advocating if people were made/to eat what they killed there would be less/ murder...and All We Need Is Love/Maybe It's the Time of Man/We were Looking for a Heart/of Gold in the eggplant/and in the zucchini." The writer of this poem confesses to being a part of the 70's crowd that extolled vegetarianism, food coops, consciousness raising, and other indicators of a non-conventional movement; but, today, she teaches a writing class and is interested in writing as a spiritual practice.

After spending time in New York City, painter Georgia O'Keefe searched for the light that would illuminate her paintings and found it in New Mexico. It seems that Jay Friedenberg has been on a similar search and discovered that light in "New Mexico Canyon Country," a center of Pueblo culture during the 9th-13th centuries. His hard pastel entitled "Chaco Ruins," located in Chaco Canyon, shows the late afternoon light as it "begins to darken details in the vertical rocks." Friedenberg writes that the adobe and grass hues brighten the landscapes in a pastel that reflects his appreciation for light and for the sweep of the New Mexico landscape. Another pastel of Chaco Cliffs features rocks and vegetation at midday in bright orange and red hues. A final pastel entitled "Canyon Morning" shows light filtering into the Chaco Canyon and is reminiscent of O'Keefe's work in which she often uses deep violet and blue hues to accent dark rocks. These arresting pastels are part of an exhibit that is featured in New York galleries, and I'm sure the exhibit attracts art lovers who appreciate the value of light in desert and mountain paintings.

A dual contribution of poetry and art by Britny Doane and David Burton showcases Corvus the Raven, a bird that would charm Edgar Allen Poe from the "other side." It's an exposition of the bird most people regard as a nuisance but whom Doane defines in "The Sensualist" as..."the sage of tricksters/changing night to day and day to night. / If you listen to my whispers/you may hear the gossip of time/I will never be starved/like my rottenly friends..." Burton's painting features the raven poised on a tree stump rising from a mist, regarding the viewer with "cunnai" (Cajun for cunning) eyes. The painting has a mystical quality Poe would have appreciated. Poet Doane's work will be featured in a book of poetry published by Pinyon Publishing in 2015.

Michael Miller, a regular contributor to the Review, gives readers a brief look into "The Next Room" with a wry description of a couple making love that is overheard through the walls by the narrator. The concise poem eclipses the passage of time and ends with an ironic twist characteristic of Miller's explicit tropes about Passion.

I liked the brief lyrics concerning age in Jean Zipp's "Haunted," in which a "withered, wheelchair worn" man sits, "his mouth agape/ In wonderment gone awry" (that last line is a starkly true line about the aged) and bestows a kiss on Zipp's hand, while she experiences "A lambent moment/Fleetingly retrieved/Who did he think I was?" A Tucson writer, Zipp has written a fascinating book, Windows: Letters to Ayla, published by Pinyon earlier this year.

Editor Gary Entsminger contributes a poem to this issue entitled "Old Bach" who "danced into life with/occult dissonances...and linking new grace notes/and his high wire canons... rubbed his eyelids until/the metal edges and wooden pipes/converged into an image/of wind chests trackers and bellows/saw himself playing the most/complex machine of the 17th century..." Gary, an accomplished musician who plays both country and classical music on several instruments, brings old Bach to life in a portrait poem that will incite readers to call for more of his lyrics.

And, finally, I enjoyed writing the review of Luci Shaw's Adventure of Ascent, a memoir that tells the story of turning points in the career of an aging poet who takes the time to reflect on the spiritual movement in her life as an octogenarian.

The works reviewed above that appear in the latest issue of Pinyon Review are only part of an outstanding literary journal celebrating the arts and sciences, a journal that continues to gain momentum in a literary world devoted to "little magazines."

P.S. The cover and frontispage photographs by John Johansson are striking, and Susan Elliott's beautiful design work underlines the quality of this distinguished journal.

Order The Pinyon Review from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

A PUFF FOR PINYON REVIEW #4

I knew I was in for visual excitement and good reading when I opened the fourth volume of Pinyon Review. On the title page of this journal celebrating the Arts and Sciences, a bewhiskered bobcat stared at me, his grey-green eyes watchful for prey. It was a photograph taken by Susan Elliott, artist, illustrator, and managing editor of the Review, who seems to be as accomplished at photographing wildlife as she is at drawing and painting it. From e-mails exchanged with Gary Entsminger, publisher and editor of the Pinyon Review, I knew that the bobcat had wandered near the cabin that houses the independent press he and Susan operate on the Uncompahgre Plateau near Montrose, Colorado. I’m expecting to see a piece of original music composed by Susan appear in the Review any day now since Susan is also an accomplished musician, composer…scientist, gardener, chef…the list of her talents is long!

A long short story in this issue of the Pinyon Review is certain to attract and hold the interest of writers. It’s a cogent lesson for writers about the friendship of a wannabe writer and a seasoned writer/teacher. The wisdom and eloquence of William Blake, e. e. cummings, and Tennyson is included in this gut-wrenching spin about life in the shadow of death. The fulfillment of a teacher’s desire to return to his second home in mountain wilderness and a student’s realization of his purpose in the world combine in a poignant story by Neil Harrison who derived his title “Cold Earth Wanderer” from a passage in one of Blake’s poems: “I traveled through a land of men/A land of men and women too/And heard and saw such dreadful things/As cold Earth wanderers never knew.” Harrison wove many passages about writing into the story without being didactic, and a paragraph toward the end of the story captures the mystique of the writing process better than any manuals on the craft I’ve read: “…There he’d learned the alchemical magic of words, that rare, inexplicable phenomenon whereby the basest of materials, a broken stick, a piece of charcoal, a pencil or pen, could conjure up spiritual gold, imbuing the wielder with a sense of belonging, of oneness with the vast universe in its ever-ongoing creation. At the front of that classroom his teacher and soon-to-be friend, Alan Horn had voiced the precise words Everett needed to hear at the time, perhaps not even fully aware that he was offering the keys to a kingdom…” Wow!

Twenty-four poems showcase the work of poets ranging from haiku by Jay Friedenburg to a prose piece about writing by Jane Hilberry. Friedenberg also treats the reader to his impressionistic pastels of landscapes; e.g., “Blue Mesa,” a soft pastel of an Arizona scene.

My friend, Michael Miller, jolts us into an awareness of our good fortune in having been born in this country in a short poem entitled "Gasoline," when the smell of gasoline evokes an image of “a citizen of Tibet running down the street ablaze,” and he concludes that fortune favors us with “our place of birth/we walk freely/Beneath the vast estate of sky.”

Editor and publisher Gary Entsminger treats us to one of his poems entitled “Masks,” in which he describes a dim view seen at night when he pulls the curtain back and looks out at “the porch cav[ing] into ruined couch/below unshingled casts from lamplight,” a view which is transformed as he ascends “well rested stairs toward bed/as if heaven waits.” Gary, who has written and published many of his poems throughout the years, makes his debut in Pinyon Review with this single poem from his collections.

This edition of Pinyon Review is packed with the work of award-winning and notable poets including Luci Shaw, Robert Shaw, Ken Fontenot, and other fine poets. As a Louisianan, I was drawn to Elizabeth Schultz’s poem about “Reviewing Kate Chopin’s The Awakening,” which is a highly visual poem based on Chopin’s iconic feminist novel. Schultz features the heroine, Edna Pontellier, stripping on the shore of Grand Isle and crawling “through the waves’ swelling sheen,/through the shadows of birds/and sinks with the dolphins around her.”

Stan Honda, who photographs night sky landscapes and is a photographer for Agence France-Presse based in New York City, contributed the cover photograph and a special section of Wupatki Sky photographs for the Review.

Entsminger aptly describes Pinyon Review as one that contains “contrasting colors and images that highlight place and mood during the transition from summer to fall,” and he and Susan certainly achieved that effect when they put together this exciting issue. Impressive!

Order copies from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, Colorado 81403.