Jackrabbit Highways

These are brave and mature poems, facing divorce and aging even as they revel in the natural world, particularly that of the high desert. The book encompasses the sweep of personal and geographical time from the shift of tectonic plates to Neolithic cave painters to the latest visit of a finch to a feeder. Imagination and verve are both praised and embodied in language that is by turns gorgeous and stark and always apt to the observation-whether it be of bees pollinating skunk cabbage or cranes descending to a marsh, to the seductiveness of succumbing to bi-polar swings. In her ode to duende and other poems, Cowing asks the reader to "consider that your life needs only longing/to be absorbed in something entire." This injunction is borne in her poetry, which is rooted in passion and blossoms in imagination. Donald Levering