Inside Idaho - Poems 1996-2007
by Charles Potts
$13.95
West End Press
Inside Idaho - Poems 1996-2007
Charles Potts, son of a government trapper and a one-room schoolma'rm who had to sell the farm at auction, and the greatest poet born in Idaho since Ezra Pound, has carried a newborn lamb wrapped in the bloody skin of its slaughtered sibling through a blizzard to the kitchen stove, been picked up and shaken in the teeth of an Appaloosa named Sonnie Boy, been bailed out of the Butte County Jail on a cold Sunday morning for being happier than the law allows on East Pass Creek Road, and lost his true love to a reckless arrogant driver in Wild Horse. True poetry is local and universal at once, "down through a dozen distinct strata of velveteen basalt," passing it all down to his three beautiful daughters, to find the root conjugation where "Idaho is an intransigient verb." Invisible and ubiquitous as the laughing water of the Pahsimeroi, Charles Potts is one of the true faces of North American poetry.