A collection of short stories journeys back to the landscape of the Great Plains to explore the lives of such characters as an Ethiopian teenager in search of his first Native American

Sworn Before Cranes

Gilfillan, Merrill

Crown

Essays deal with a Kansas farm town, Billy the Kid's stolen tombstone, the cosmology of the Pawnee Indians, the behavior of prairie chickens, and modern life on the Great Plains

Magpie Rising: Sketches from T

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

Vintage

The rolling, billowing, delicate landscape of Nebraska’s Sandhills; the tombstone of Billy the Kid—stolen so often that it must be caged and shackled—in Fort Sumner, New Mexico; an intercontinental ballistic missile trundling down a highway under heavy guard in Weld County, Colorado; cottonwoods and cranes, faded hotels and abandoned trailers painted aqua and purple; the ghosts of Pawnees, Cheyennes, and Kiowas and generations of settlers whose descendants now grouse in a café in Heimdahl, North Dakota, or roar off to a bikers convention in Sturgis, South Dakota. These are some of the things that catch Merrill Gilfillan’s eye and ear in this radiant collection of essays. Written with a poetic economy that often attains grandeur, Magpie Rising is an exhilarating tour of the Great Plains—its geography, wildlife, history, mythology, and food, its vast spaces and weirdly synchronous time. This is nature writing at its most evocative and insightful.

Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Bison Books

The rolling, billowing, delicate landscape of Nebraskaâ€™s Sandhills; the tombstone of Billy the Kidâ€”stolen so often that it must be caged and shackledâ€”in Fort Sumner, New Mexico; an intercontinental ballistic missile trundling down a highway under heavy guard in Weld County, Colorado; cottonwoods and cranes, faded hotels and abandoned trailers painted aqua and purple; the ghosts of Pawnees, Cheyennes, and Kiowas and generations of settlers whose descendants now grouse in a cafÃ in Heimdahl, North Dakota, or roar off to a bikers convention in Sturgis, South Dakota. These are some of the things that catch Merrill Gilfillanâ€™s eye and ear in this radiant collection of essays.Â Written with a poetic economy that often attains grandeur, Magpie Rising is an exhilarating tour of the Great Plainsâ€”its geography, wildlife, history, mythology, and food, its vast spaces and weirdly synchronous time. This is nature writing at its most evocative and insightful.

History

Americas

Pruett Pub. Co

"Gilfillan is a storyteller whose appeal is more mystical than realistic."—ALA Booklist
Gilfillan’s -observations, quotations, etymologies, and classical forms are constructed by equal parts scholar and aesthete. He is a master of Low Distance. Gilfillan watches and then watches again. His writing is workman-like in the sense of what words are like, and luminous in its experimental directions.
"If John Clare had toured the United States with Oscar Wilde, their notebooks, twisted together in a tornado and edited by Audubon and Escoffier, might have read like these poems: evocative, sophisticated, and as ever-in-the-present as memory must always be."—Tom Raworth
Merrill Gilfillan is the author of five books of poems and several books of prose essays.

The Seasons (Adventures in Poetry)

Poetry

Zephyr Press

Poetry. Author of numerous books of short stories and award-winning travel and nature essays Merrill Gilfillan is a poet of remarkable vision, insight and accomplishment. His poems speak of the natural world: earth, sky, water, and all the complexities and contradictions of human presence in that world. Jim Harrison said of Gilfillan's most recent book of essays, Rivers & Birds, "If anyone writes better prose in American I am unaware of it." SMALL WEATHERS is Gilfillan's tenth and largest collection of new work. Tom Raworth has this to say about Merrill's poems-"If John Clare had toured the United States with Oscar Wilde, their notebooks, twisted together in a tornado and edited by Audubon and Escoffier, might have read like these poems; evocative, sophisticated and as ever-in-the-present as memory must always be." Cover art by Win Knowlton

Small Weathers

Qua Books

Poetry. With exuberance and economy, Merrill Gilfillan's UNDANCEABLE evokesthe landscape of the American West through the geographic word. Placenames, the texture of speech, and a certain aroma of nature permeatethese pages. Ever alert to unforeseen connections, Gilfillan followsboth eye and ear, his poems unfolding at the pace of consciousness. Be sure to check out Gilfillan's many other titles also available from SPD.

Undanceable (Flood Editions)

Flood Editions

“If John Clare had toured the United States with Oscar Wilde, their notebooks, twisted together in a tornado and edited by Audubon and Escoffier, might have read like these poems: evocative, sophisticated, and as ever-in-the-present as memory must always be.”—Tom Raworth“The strongest poems feature a solitary, omniscient observer responding to the sky and land. . . . Deceptively simple, these poems reveal new beauties with each reading.”—Publishers Weekly“Go to New York and you’ll be famous in five years,” Ted Berrigan told Merrill Gilfillan in 1969. That time in New York gave rise to Gilfillan’s first two books through Berkeley’s Blue Wind Press—Skyliner and To Creature. The next 15 years included more poetry and two award-winning prose collections: Chokecherry Places: Essays from the High Plains (1998), which won the Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, and Magpie Rising (2000), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.This volume collects material from Gilfillan’s books of poetry up through 1999’s Satin Street and swatches of unpublished work from 1965 to 2000.Gilfillan’s observations, etymologies, and riffs on classical and modern forms are constructed by equal parts naturalist and aesthete. He employs a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the literary and visual arts, philosophical treatises, musical forms, the natural world, and the everyday language that gets spoke along rivers.Merrill Gilfillan was born in Ohio in 1945 and raised there. He attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 1967, where he won the Major Hopwood Prize for poetry in his senior year. He attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop for two years, studying with Ted Berrigan, Anselm Hollo, and George Starbuck, among others. He lived and worked in New York City for eight years, and then moved to Colorado, where he wrote feature stories for Boulder and Denver newspapers. He makes his home in Colorado.

Selected Poems 1965-2000

Adventures in Poetry

Literary Nonfiction. Nature Writing. In these twenty-six short essays, Merrill Gilfillan records his encounters with Wood Warblers as they flit through North American landscapes on their migratory paths. With precision, appetite, and a touch of whimsy, he sketches the tiny birds in their surroundings, perfecting the art of what he elsewhere calls "alfresco writing." Throughout, THE WARBLER ROAD testifies to birding as a meditative, even votive dedication and a fundamental mode of attention to the world: "When I walk out with binoculars in May and September, it is often the fly fisherman in Yeats's poem I have in mind as I move along the path. We are both out to discover and authenticate the morning, to break the glaze of habitude and mark, for an hour or so, the weave and fine points of the season and its day-in-place." As Peter Matthiessen writes, "A bird book for poets, precisely and evocatively observed, beautifully written. Would that such a eulogy existed for every family of birds."

The Warbler Road (Flood Editions)

Contemporary

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gilfillan, Merrill. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gilfillan, Merrill

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gilfillan, Merrill. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Sworn Before Cranes

Magpie Rising: Sketches from T

Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains

Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains

The Seasons (Adventures in Poetry)

Small Weathers

Small Weathers

Undanceable (Flood Editions)

Selected Poems 1965-2000

The Warbler Road (Flood Editions)