Lost River Mountain
by Charles Potts
$15.00
Blue Begonia Press
Lost River Mountain
These poems are models from a working hand -- a ranch hand, a book hand, a shadow hand on the wall -- from fingers held up to touch and to decry. Charles Potts envisions an apocalypse of dust blown up from the volcanic land he loves. His Idaho rises again as Potts turns his hand toward his home and history, his family and the West's criminal politics. Always, like his golden eagle, he "reaches toward the fleshy parts," and, like his quirky hero Fearless Ferris, "his lines get truer all the time."
Dan Lamberton
Lost River Mountain is a love song to Idaho. In a way, the book is an elegy. Yet there is a subtle optimistic plea that the lives, the efforts of those who have gone before us not be wasted -- that ultimately we make something of ourselves and this land, something harmonious and grand.
Phil Wagner The Iconoclast Mohegan Lake, New York
His sense of ecology and history, especially changes wrought by the advance of the white businessmen and exploiter-destroyers of the pristine landscape is stark and uncompromising...Now deep in his mid-life years, Potts seems unable (or unwilling) to distill Idaho from his being. What a presence the area remains...One thing is clear: few poets have written so movingly about origins, and how those early locales may remain within us forever.
Robert Peters Chiron Review #59, Autumn, 1999
You get this unity of time, place and blood-folklore: very important because of the catholicity of his gaze: astrogeology, geology, folklore, history, economics & political polemic...Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written In a Country Churchyard" is mentioned twice, if you don't get it. This is Potts' elegy to his family and the agrarian impulse; and if Gray's is more beautiful, Potts', by virtue of greater length and lack of constraints, is more powerful and true...Lost River Mountain is a very good book. As an examination of people and place as good as any you'll read from an American writer, including Capote and McPhee.