13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You just can't loose with Gerry Spence, October 6, 2000
This review is from: Gerry Spence's Wyoming: The Landscape (Hardcover)
This is a "coffeetable" book of photos and poems. They are excellent renderings of Wyoming. The book comes with a CD of Mr. Spence reading the poems. Sit back, turn on the CD and go on a journey of the past, the future and the everchanging beauty of Wyoming. There is food for thought in the poems, also. It is very interesting to note the difference between the way one reads the poems and the way Mr. Spence, as their author, reads them.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gerry Spence, Renaissance Man, September 13, 2004
For this right-wing gun-nut, Gerry Spence is one of my favorite lefties. I used to enjoy his MSNBC program, hearing his crystal clear and caustic barbs, his populist message and his most learned opinions on legal cases circulating at the time. Most importantly, he was one of the few on the left who saw the massacre of the Branch Davidians at Waco for the brutal and horrific slaughter at the hands of Janet Reno that it was.
That is what the world needs most: Honest men and women, who don't flinch from the truth when the truth happens to gore oxen on their side of their political fence. Like the land from which he hails, Gerry Spence brims over with the pioneer spirit: Rough and rugged, independent and erudite, full of common sense and plain decency, he is a man more at home in the 19th than the 20th century (never mind the weak and effete "metrosexual" wussies of this 21st century).
One could call this book "The Memoirs of the Last Real Man." Though his photography is traditionalist, somewhat akin to the formalistic work of Ansel Adams, the vision is singularly Spence's. A labor of love, a visual celebrating of the artist's solitary homeland, one can sense that where most men see only barren badlands, Spence sees splendrous vistas, touched by the hand of the Creator.
Although his photographs are bold, they are yet quiet and bare the soul of a man who's quite comfortable in his own skin. They are simple, yet powerful, documents of a land upon which man is but a temporal, fleeting presence. The permanance of the land is the only constant.
Thus are his most interesting landscapes not one's purely of nature, but of the fragile hand of man before the inevitability of nature's supremacy: Abandoned dwellings, out-of-business gas stations, empty granaries are but shadows of their former bustling selves. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
His portraits do not overlook this truth; the few humans portrayed in this text are part and parcel of the land -- a cowboy, a mountaineer, a modern-day Annie Oakley, a Shoshoni Indian. These are not people who are enslaved by the claustrophobic office cubicle.
Thus does Spence write in the poem "The People Are the Landscape":
The people are the landscape,
The woman on the county grader
Plowing out the last of last winter's snow
The wild crying Shoshoni dancing,
His days not done
The shepherd by his wagon
Lost in a landscape of bleeting,
Old faces furrowed in the sun.
Their faces are the landscape,
Their faces, the land,
Hard and honest,
With no pretensions in the morning.
Absent is the didactic, pedantic hectoring of the man-hating environmentalists; Spence understands intuitively the American Indian conception that man is part of the Earth, and that before he returns to the Earth, that his place is properly living in harmony with the Earth, for the Earth is his grandmother.
This book, though by a celebrity attorney, is the furthest thing from the vapid and glitzy world of celebrity. It is the work of a man alone, relating through his eyes and mind how nature and man have moved him. In awe, to tears, with laughter.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"a landscape bereft of its people is no landscape at all.", March 25, 2007
This review is from: Gerry Spence's Wyoming: The Landscape (Hardcover)
Thank you,Gerry,for the wonderful experience of experiencing the wonders of Wyoming. Spending the time listening to you read your poems while following the words in the book and bringing it to life with your personal photographs;is a real pleasure.
It's been said, that someone once asked Picasso how long it took him to paint one of his pictures. His reply was that it took about 40 years. With that thought in mind,it can surely be said that it took Gerry Spence at least 40 years, but more likely closer to a lifetime of 70 years to gain the love and feeling of his country to write this wonderful book.
I have read a few of his books,but none convey the feel of his surroundings and country as well as this book does.
I am not a particular fan of recorded books;but in this case ,the combination of photographs,written words to follow,while we listen to Gerry's impassioned reading is simply stunning.
The photograph of the girl sitting in the window of a long abandoned log cabin is accompanied with this short,haunting poem;
They Have Gone
They have gone,
And here we are,
Flying on the wings of history.
captures the days of the pioneers who settled the land.
Then we see the two photographs on pages 82 and 83.An abandoned cabin at close range and then at a distance across water.One can feel how glad to see his cabin at a distance,the owner must have been, when it came into view; and then how glad he was to finally reach its door.It takes the soul of an artist ,first to see this scene and then capture it with his camera.The reader is left with wondering what stories this cabin could tell.
Gerry captures this land with this poem;
It's over
This is the last roundup.
We have abandoned the long prairies
And the endless,rolling mountains,
We have abandoned this blessed realm
To the antelope,the prairie dogs
And a new horde of interlopers
Who chop the land
Into mournful pieces
For investment bankers
Who hanker to become
Real cowboys on twenty acres.
Thank you,Gerry,for sharing this landscape,people and quickly disappearing way of life with us.
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