The Wolf Yearling: Poems

Jeffrey Alfier acquired a keen poetic vision from years of living and traveling throughout the Southwest. Composed mainly in syllabic verse, "The Wolf Yearling" exhibits strict attention to tightly controlled language that renders, in rich imagism, American deserts and mountains, the plains of the Trans-Pecos, border towns, and the sandy soils of east Texas. Man and beast transit borders blurred in heat-shimmer, the air "so candent even a kiss could warp." There is a splendor to what survives the desert's beleaguering high-noon sun that "owns the graves of water;" or, in its twilight descent, trawls "a final swath over the saltpan of dead ocean." The Southwest flora and fauna that Alfier celebrates is wide-ranging. Readers will come to know the desert as Alfier does, seeking to join him down "forgotten dirt trails / impassable to anything with wheels" amid the sublime or fading beauty of towns and landscapes. Strangers, wanderers and residents alike populate his verse as they thrive in austere wildness where the world endures in canyons where "iridescent crows...glimmer through dust motes graining the light," out among the "igneous giants of petrified time," the ever-lurking coyote a "dark movement breaking a highway's mirage," while someone watches a puma laying bare the "sudden bloody ribcage" of a palomino. Thus an elegiac thread runs throughout "The Wolf Yearling." We find an aged father being returned to his boyhood home in the California desert where "dust devils churn birds to air" when he recalls "names of friends lost in Rommel's Africa." Alfier also locates among harsh settings the simple, quiet idyll of nightfall on a bajada, where yucca flowers are "clustered like monks at vespers." Where there is elegy there is healing and pastoral beauty. We find this throughout, in the nourishing darkness of the mesas, alive with "verdant windrows of remnant springs;" in witnessing "trails written by storms" that come seasonally to the desert, offering temporal rivers a man and his grandson skip stones, while a romantic couple splashes in the storm-swollen Gila River, the red waves of the woman's hair "singing with light. Alfier is an alert and attentive witness of the American Southwest, and the vision of "The Wolf Yearling" is both precise and significant.

"Alfier's sharp lyrics come upon you like a door slammed by a hot desert wind might wake a lonely man into a new life. They are demotic, lived, and, without being sentimental, hopeful that our little span of being human matters after all." DOUG ANDERSON, "Poet-in-Residence at Ft. Juniper, Amherst, Massachusetts, instructor in poetry at Emerson and Smith Colleges"

"If the forbidding and starkly beautiful American Southwest were condensed to the nuances of language, Alfier would be its quintessential oracle. He writes forcefully not only of the flora and fauna eking out existence in its sunlight and its shadows but also of the existential loneliness so piquantly characteristic of its human inhabitants. Even more striking, however, than the engaging and powerfully rendered subjects of his poems is his mastery of language. I know of no poet writing today who handles the demanding form of syllabics (while consistently maintaining line integrity) with the consummate artistry of Alfier. Without any hesitation whatsoever, I give this fine collection of poems my highest recommendation." LARRY D. THOMAS, "Member, Texas Institute of Letters, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate"

"Each poem is a testament to Alfier's unflinching observations and hard-fought love of the Southwest. This is a rich portrait of a stunning landscape...The Wolf Yearling is a gift." KEITH EKISS, author of "Puma Road Notebook, " Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University