Texas Poetry Calendar 2010 Review

Texas poetry is alive and well thanks to the folks at Dos Gatos Press.

This small publisher is dedicated to promoting Texas poets and poetry, primarily with the publication of their annual calendar book, which is in its twelfth annual year of print.

The Texas Poetry Calendar 2010 is an attractive, spiral-bound book containing over eighty poems, each submitted by one of a talented range of poets who reside all over the Lone Star state. For each annual edition, the poems are selected by the book's editors Scott Wiggerman and Cindy Huyser.

The poems cover a wide variety of subjects and images, all of which will be recognizable and appreciated by Texans, as well as others. These might be one's first impressions of visiting a remote town in West Texas, or recalling the weather in the piney woods of East Texas.

South of the Nueces by Mary Bryan Stafford begins with, "A sultry Gulf breeze holds August afternoons captive," and goes on to invoke the orange blossoms that "exude a perfume through early April nights intoxicating even the stars."

Some poems are haunted by to the Galveston and Bolivar Peninsula catastrophe of Hurricane Ike. Erica Lehrer's Whorls begins,

"When they told us to leave the island,
we fussed that we'd never left before and weren't leaving now."

Others are not nearly so melancholy, but focus on the beauty of Texas.

Spring on Texas Hills by Roberta Pipes Bowman simply reads:

Mockingbird hoedowns
bluebonnets prance over hills
yellow daises nod.

Since most of Texas was thirsty from a drought during the first half of 2009, several poems mention this. There are also submissions that delve into political subjects like Ten Commandments, Texas Style by Catherine M. Sjostedt and Permission Slip, 1966 by Debra L. Winegarten.