All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems [Hardcover]

Walter McDonald (Author), Janet M. Neugebauer (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 1992

Winner of the 1993 National Cowboy Hall of Fame Western Heritage Award for Poetry "Ever since discovering Walter McDonald's work, I've been moved by its evocation of the spirit of his native West Texas plains ....... This man knows not only who but where he is, and in a quietly masculine way, with clean, strong, unsentimental words and images, he celebrates that whereness. . . . It is a book worth having, and reading, and rereading time and again. " — John Graves All That Matters is Walt McDonald's thirteenth collection—seventy five new and selected poems, illustrated with photographs that archivist Janet Neugebauer selected from the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University. Walt has published sixteen other collections of poetry and fiction, including Blessings the Body Gave (Ohio State University Press, 1998), Counting Survivors (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), Night Landings (Harper & Row, 1989), After the Noise of Saigon (University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), and The Flying Dutchman (Ohio State University Press, 1987). Two other books won Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame: The Digs in Escondido Canyon (Texas Tech University Press), and Rafting the Brazos (University of North Texas Press). His book of fiction is A Band of Brothers: Stories from Vietnam (Texas Tech University Press). He was an Air Force pilot and is now director of creative writing at Texas Tech University. He has published more than 1,700 poems in journals including American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Century, First Things, The Formalist, The Georgia Review, Image, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, & The Southern Review. Natives of Texas, he and his wife Carol have three children and seven grandchildren.

Editorial Reviews

Review

After A Year In Korea
After Eden
After The Flight Home From Saigon
Alone In A Windstorm
At The Football Stadium
The Barn On The Farm We're Buying
Black Wings Wheeling
Blue Skies
A Brief, Familiar Story Of Winter
Building On Hardscrabble
Cattle In Rain
Caught In A Storm On Hardscrabble
The Children's Hour
Deductions From The Laws Of Motion
The Digs In Escondido Canyon (1)
Double Mountain Fork Of The Brazos
Driving Home To The Plains
Drying Up
Dust Devils
The Eyes In Grandfather's Oils
Father's Revolver
Feeding The Winter Cattle
Fiddles And Steel Guitars
Finding My Father's Hands In Mid-life
Getting It Done
Goat Ranching
The Goats Of Summer
Growing Up Near Escondido Canyon
Hawks In A Bitter Blizzard
Home
The Honey Man
Leaving The Middle Years
Living On Open Plains
Losing A Boat On The Brazos
Making Book On The Aquifer
Marriage
Memento Mori
Mercy And The Brazos River
Mounds At Estacaco
My Brother In Summer
Night Missions
The Night Of Rattlesnake Chili
Old Men Fishing At Brownwood
On A Screened Porch In The Country
The One That Got Away
Out Of The Whirlwind
Plains And The Art Of Writing
Prairie Dogs Live In Lubbock
Praise
Rig-sitting
Rock Softly In My Arms
Sandstorms
Seining For Carp
Setting Out Oaks In Winter
Settling The Plains (1)
Starting A Pasture
Sundown
Taking Each Deep Breath
Things About To Disappar
Tied Up Under Trees
Tornado Chasing
Trains, Up Close And Far Away
Uncle Bubba And The Buzzards
Uncle Rollie And The Laws Of Water
Weeds Barn Owls, All Nibbling Goats
Whatever Ground We Walk On
Whatever It Takes (1)
When Children Think You Can Do Anything
Where The Trees Go
Wildcatting
Wind And Hardscrabble
Windmills Near Escondido
The Winter Before The War (1)
Witching On Hardscrabble
A Woman Acquainted With The Night
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Hardcover: 154 pages
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press (January 15, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0896722910
• ISBN-13: 978-0896722910
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,092,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Collection - Warrants Multiple Readings, April 19, 2004

By 

Michael Wischmeyer (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems (Hardcover)

Man is seemingly insignificant when measured against the extensive plains of Texas. The vast open space combined with an unforgiving climate is overwhelming. However, Walter McDonald paints a different picture with his evocative plains poetry. His final lines in the last poem in this book provide the title for this remarkable collection: "where we live, only brown earth and sky and in between, all that matters".

I have not lived on the Texas plains, but with a son attending Texas Tech in Lubbock I have traveled frequently across the Texas panhandle. We have driven a hundred back roads stretching across the sparsely settled, eroded flatlands, seeing the occasional windmill, a few scattered cattle, miles of barb wire fencing, and isolated farms and ranches. (And unexpectedly, we also encountered endless miles of trenching to accommodate fiber optics cable.) We have hiked and camped in Palo Duro Canyon and Canyon State Park. We have come to enjoy this vast land and the people that call it home.

Walter McDonald is one of the best poets in America today. This collection warrants reading again and again. Janet Neugebauer, an archivist for the extensive Southwest Collection, worked with McDonald to match historic photos to his perceptive poetry. These haunting photos are housed in a history research center on the campus of Texas Tech.

"It is wind, not rain, dry cattle need." I suspect that many urban dwellers, like me, have never realized this truth. McDonald's poetry is clearly regional poetry, and yet it is much more. The landscape of Texas appears foreign and intimidating to the visitor, and this strangeness could have been the subject of this collection. The poetry of Walter McDonald, however, focuses on the people that live in this harsh environment, a people that have come to love life on the great plains. This is poetry about people that you will long remember.