Customer Reviews

The Big Roundup: Classic and Contemporary Poetry from CowboyPoetry.com

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The Big Roundup: Classic and Contemporary Poetry from CowboyPoetry.com is a grand and impressive collection of verse about the Old West. Single-paragraph biographies of the many and varied poets help flesh out this flavorful, soul-stirring collection of verse that speaks to the heart. The Big Roundup is an excellent gift idea for anyone who enjoys poetry about the American West, and a highly recommended addition to personal, academic, and community library poetry collections and reading lists. Home From The Winter Range: We gathered the winter range today,/and brought the cattle in./The old cows still were fat as hogs,/but the two year olds were thin./It's sixteen miles of downhill road,/and the cows all know the way./They're tired of eating slough-grass,/and looking forward to some hay.//A cattle drive in January,/aint generally so nice./But today the sun shone brightly,/on our world of snow and ice./An easy day for horse and man,/because, as all cowboys know,/it aint too hard to chase a cow,/some place she wants to go! Mike Puhallo

My first introduction to cowboy poetry and it is quite a ride. I recommend it highly as an addition to anyone's poetry library. It ranks right up there with the well-known classics. I especially enjoyed David Dague's "Backward R Double Bar D". His approach to raising grass fed beef doesn't preach but is handled with humor and subtlty.

"The Big Roundup" is a must read for anyone who is interested in the west or who simply appreciates and enjoys metered rhyme.

Round 'em up for the roundelay, pardners, cuz a whole herd of woolly versifiers is ridin' hard and shootin' straight in this rootin'-tootin' anthology that claims to have corralled "the best poems from the world's greatest collection of cowboy poetry." So fer as I kin tell, the PR writer ain't just pullin' yer chaps on that one. At 400+ pages, one has to wonder if this collection might not represent ALL the cowboy poetry in the world.

Anyways, if it's been a while since you've actually had fun with a thick book of poems, The Big Roundup will be a refreshing change of pace. Largely eschewing the modern urbanites' love of blank verse, the "poet lariats" featured in this volume show no fear of rounding up a rhyme or two -- and most of them adhere to meters that suggest that many of these verses have pulled double duty as songs. Try this stanza, for instance, from "The Western Home" by Brewster Higley et. al., 1873:

I love the wild flowers / In this bright land of ours, / I love, too, the wild curlew's scream / The bluffs and white rocks / And antelope flocks / That graze on the mountain so green.

If there's something strangely familiar about that rhythm, try singing it to the tune often applied to the same poem's most famous stanza -- the one that begins "Oh, give me a home / Where the buffalo roam. . . " That's just one of the entertaining discoveries you'll happen across in a volume that sings with the poetry of folks with names like French Camp Red, Buckshot Dot, Charley Sierra and Tex Tumbleweed. I reckon it goes without sayin' that this here collection is an absolute must for any red-blooded American library. -- P.MILLER for the FEARLESS REVIEWS

I gave this book to my mother, who is a Montanan. She complained that there were no Montana authors represented in the book.