Original review By Steve Labinski

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.

Travis Blair describes his first visit to Amarillo, Texas in the poem Blue Norther:

Winter of '79 I fainted.
I remeber walking
into an Amarillo 7-Eleven
out of a wind chill of five degrees
and snow blowing sideways
through barbed wire fences.

The heat inside the store
rushed my head like a cattle train.
I felt it coming and tried to sit
on a case of Texaco motor oil
but tumble-weeded head first
onto the concrete floor.

He continues describing his memorable first encounter in the seemingly strange and alien town in the Texas Panhandle in what is one of our personal favorites. We will let you get the book to read the entire poem, and all the rest

The book also contains information on submitting poetry for the 2011 edition.

A wide variety of poetry coupled with the useful weekly calendar pages makes this large, sturdy print edition a worthy present or gift to oneself, packing lots of Texas visuals, senses, memories and wordplay into a very special style.

Softcover: 144 spiral-bound pages
Publisher: Dos Gatos Press (July 1, 2009)
Purchase Book on Amazon.Com

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