And a celebration is exactly what Neugebauer and McDonald have forged in the historic photographs and poems they've paired to tell the story of the settlement and so much more. McDonald's new and selected poems connect to the moments in time that the photographs preserve, but evoke stories that focus on the scope and quality of life both then and in the century since ranching and farming came to the region. The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems and the culmination of a vision the authors say they've shared for almost a decade.
Most trees dry up, stunted on starving roots.
To save imported stumps, we ditch the fields with peat imported from swamps, tamp bone meal into dirt for roses. Cactus rode here as burrs with soldiers, their Spanish ponies stumbling under the sun, dumping knobs of seeds from weed fields miles away. Let stallions and cattle be enough, rough bunks and windmills the way to pray, cow chips for fire, cactus and rattlers the price they paid for range and a thousand miles of stars. Janet Neugebauer is an associate archivist for the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University, where the photographs in Whatever the Wind Delivers are housed. Walt McDonald , the author of seventeen collections of poems, is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of English and Poet in Residence at Texas Tech University.