"Blind Pumper at the Well, Poems from My Eightieth Year", evokes my "primitive" American Indian childhood and young manhood, and it evokes my awareness of modern life, my experience of war and the experience of others. The book is an affirmation of a peaceful life and a life lived in harmony with Nature. It evokes love, that between men and women and that among all human beings. It evokes my awareness of my 80 years of life and my coming death.

Table of Contents

SECTION ONE (SAYING AND SEEING) Ask, You Have Nothing to Lose Words Concerned with Words Student, Writing For a Former Mountain Climber Ecology, Biology and Poetry at Dawn A Fancy Dancer, Ascending Among Mountain Flowers "Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness" In the New Museum the Ancients' Artas Catharsis Theory Proves True Moment in Museum Adam and Eve, Freiburg Modern Art Museum The Calm of Bronze Photo of Neighboring Farm Couple Renoir's Couples Dancing, We, Depending onWhich Century, Kiss or Do Not Homage to Henry Moore's Sculptures on an Outer Wall of the Roemer Cathedral, Frankfurt am Main, and the Figures of Christ Inside A Sublime Matisse Odalisque and a U.S. Grotesque Still Life, Museum Living Room Celebrity and Nail SECTION TWO (WAR: DECLARATIONS, EVOCATIONS AND CONDEMNATION) Sheep Ranch Home, Near Air Base Warplanes, Hummingbird, Cat and Poet Blossoms, Wings, Words Descendants, an All-But-Extinct Bird's and an Almost-Vanished Vanishing American's Night Sky, Indian Ridge Going Home, After Camping on Indian Ridge My Country Again Threatening Aggression A Killer Seeking Forgiveness A Hunt and After A Survivor of the Depression and World War Two, I Read a Daily Paper Some Future Soldiers' Tic-Tac Attack Becoming a Man, World War Two Sky Bent A Bomber Crewman's Dance Around the Dead Bird, Cat and Soldier, Between Battles Old German Woman, Some Wars A Cherokee Airman Remembers Two Wars A Cherokee Secular Formula to Cure Egoism An American, in a Polyester Suit, on an Egyptian Beach A Meditation on Aging Peaches in the Pantry, Some Rhymes for Smug Inheritors A Nightmare After 9-11 Boat Song SECTION THREE (CENTURIES OF LOVERS) A Junior High Glimpse of the Future Love Story with Inevitable Denouement Bird Heard, Leopards, Sloths and Lovers Glimpsed A Time in the Zoo Centuries of Lovers Remembering Innocence Dawn Coffee Stop, Nearing Home A Grandfather's Hope, Wish or Prayer Early Planting A Glimpse Between the Pool Hall's Blinds For My Wife's Father, Edward Wendt An American-Indian Success Story in India SECTION FOUR (SOME FORESHADOWINGS) A Defense Against the Evil Without and the Evil Within Two Poems in Memory of Nils-Aslak Valkeapaeae (B. 1943, D. 2001) Ochoco Forest, a Sound in the Night Grateful To My Heart, an Emancipation Proclamation Inner Page Medical Advice, from a Patient The Eloquent Bones, a Second Coming Hospital Parking Lot Every Damned One Night Highway, War Three Visitations or Evocations The Suicide of the Son of a Friend Some Last Words for a Young Poet For Don Monroe Seven Days After Burying My Brother War on, One Brother, Sixteen,and, I, Fourteen, Try to Be Men A Zebra-Stripe Kite in Gray Sky Above Flags and Graves For Robert Wessels Two Birds, One Air Rifle BB and a Summer Without Rain Rented Rooms, London, New York A New Year's Fantasy, on Broadway Photograph of My Father as Van Gogh's Peasant in Straw Hat A Ritual for Approaching My Father's Death A Ceremony for Trying to Accept Death

About the Author

Ralph Salisbury is of English-Irish-American Indian descent. His writing covers themes from ecology to anti-war protest and support for world brotherhood and sisterhood. He was a volunteer in the US Air Force in WWII, and became an opponent to the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq. His father's father was a Cherokee medicine man. His paternal grandmother was a Cherokee-Shawnee story teller. A natural, self-taught musician with an eloquent voice, Salisbury's father made a living as a traveling minstrel before settling on the Iowa farm, where Salisbury was born.

Prizes

Ralph Salisbury has established himself over a long and productive career as a voice of sanity in a world riven by war, racism, and despair. His poems teach us, among other important lessons, the constant need for compassion. We are grateful for his new poems in "Blind Pumper at the Well". -- John Witte, author of The Hurtling and Second Nature, and editor of Northwest Review Ralph Salisbury's "Blind Pumper at the Well" bears witness to human suffering and to the horrors of war. The poems are generous and kind. Salisbury celebrates the beauty inherent in family, the mysteries of loss, the sadness of the human condition, and through scrupulous reflection, arrives whole, wise, and in the moment. Blind Pumper at the Well is a gift. -- Rodger Moody, Editor, Silverfish Review Press Ralph Salisbury's poems in this latest volume are witness to his genius for words, witness to his reverence for language, and they show his deep and abiding concern for the human loss in wars and the rumors of war. As an artist, Salisbury is at his best here: time and time again the force of his words is framed in sturdy periodical sentences that hit you smack between the eyes with their crescendoing, image-packed truth. -- Jim Barnes, author of Visiting Picasso, and editor Chariton Review It's great to see the energy of an 80-year-old poet at work, in Ralph Salisbury's "Blind Pumper at the Well". Mixing WWII memories with his observations of the peaceful world outside his study windows, these poems celebrate longevity and unflagging concern for peace. -- Diane Wakoski, author of Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987 and The Butcher's Apron: New & Selected Poems