Prayer's Prairie digs into a terrain and its people, past and present, to upturn and preserve artifacts of the mind.
Artfully composed and immersive, set among the fires and grasses from the Great Lakes to the Northern Plains, these poems revere the prairie-scape and the Prayer's complexities of lives and deaths on its soils. Its people show a compassion "that still salves, still stings."
The rough loveliness of the habitat emerges from the soil-the "wild onion, clover, stinging nettles, husks and rasps" are "entitled to be prairie." And its inhabitants are called to higher standards. A speaker calls out destruction in the name of progress, posing questions such as
"If the / machine is dominant, what and who / are submissive, and why?"
Yet, much remains. The poems are a recognition of the beautiful permanence of this land and the generations who lived there.