backward pilgrim, by Deb Akers

backward pilgrim. Poems by Deborah Akers. Perfect bound with French folds. 5.5 x 8 inches. 98 pages. ISBN 978-1-938928-00-0. 2013. $16.

The Front Range was a magnetic backdrop to an otherwise conventional American childhood. A 14,000–foot mountain centered the complex of peaks and slopes that filled my western horizon. It was a daily conversation of shadow and hectic light, green and gray stone incised with snow that could arrive in any season. There was never a day that the sky did not reveal something compelling and eternal — Deb Akers

In poems pulsing with the dense, rich music of partial rhyme, Deborah Akers brings us her arresting vision of the Colorado Rockies, a landscape where “… ten thousand feet / raises the stakes / to biblical proportions…,” where “eons of crushed lives / crowd into / swaths of sandstone…” From kyrie to benedictus, Akers sings the songs of a pilgrim come to the mountain. On these pages she invokes what might be lost, if not for the power of her poems to reclaim it. — Paulann Peterson, Oregon Poet Laureate