Poems on the power of memory and the shading of past into present. In this enthralling collection, National Book Award finalist and former Poet Laureate of California Carol Muske-Dukes composes a lyrical autobiography, tracing her family history from the Dakota prairie to her new life as a young mother in Los Angeles. In "The Separator," Muske-Dukes writes of her grandfather, a wheat farmer, winnowing, threshing, planting a future in the deep black soil of Wyndmere, North Dakota. In "Biglietto d'Ingresso," she recalls a perfect day in Tuscany, spent with her future husband in a town overlooking a wine valley. "August, Los Angeles, Lullaby" is a lulling yet harrowing description of the wonder of a mother holding her newborn child - and her own fragility, encountering mortality - as a hummingbird touches the hourglass of the feeder outside the window... then is gone.
"Wyndmere performs a rare feat: It celebrates love in all its vagaries without the slightest self-indulgence or self-importance. [Muske-Dukes's] tone, as she observes her own fears and passions, is bemused and restrained; her eye is always on the object."
Marjorie Perloff
"I admire enormously the power and beauty, the bright, clear language... It is the poet's character which shows and at times even shines through the language into the poems... It is hard to believe most poems these days; most poems any time, probably. Not these."
