Bøger af Ken Lauter

In the Company of Animals is the personal story of one man's relationship withanimals across the eighty years of his life, a meditation on humanity's horrible historyof animal abuse, and an urgent plea for mercy and justice for animals in today'sworld.Poet Ken Lauter went vegetarian in 1976, and still struggles to go vegan - but isconvinced that non-human animals must be fully liberated if our own species is tohave a sustainable future or a sane social/spiritual life. Lauter doesn't "preach" thatmessage, but embodies it in a wide variety of work (100+ poems and 12 prose pieces).For both animal-lovers and animal-eaters, the voyage through these pages will provememorable - and perhaps life-changing.

The poems of VERMEER IN WORDS explore the inner workings of the Dutch master's exquisite paintings, both in order to articulate their aesthetic principles and to reveal some of their deeper intimations. For fuller context, the poems and paintings are interleaved with short passages describing 17th century Dutch history, art, and society. What emerges is a collection that celebrates Vermeer's unique gifts while plumbing his personal predicament, values, and artistic achievements. Anyone who loves Vermeer will find the book a rich reading experience.

GRAND CANYON DAYS explores one of the world's great geological wonders- its past and present, its rock, waters, plants, and animals. The book spans fifty years of the author's life and reflects both our current national identity and the Canyon's lingering sense of myth and sacred reverberation from earlier eras. Along the way, we meet such characters as John Wesley Powell, ancient canyon residents, and a couple of ordinary American tourists. Ultimately, these poems take us not merely into a deep place but into deep thoughts about the social, environmental, and spiritual legacy of all canyons.The companion book, SONGS FROM WALNUT CANYON, is also available from Xlibris.

The Ratlue Diaries is a fictionalized memoir of "the Rocking K War," a five-year battle to save the Rincon Valley in Tucson, Arizona. An old cattle ranch, the Rocking K was under threat of being transformed into two luxury hotels, golf courses, and 25,000 new houses. The tale is told (in both poems and prose) by two poets, one of whom is the author's alter ego. In spite of vastly different personal histories, the two men forge a sometimes strained but deep bond as they take on a ruthless real-estate cabal. They mobilize resistance, raise hell at public hearings, mount a referendum, and endure blowback from a millionaire land-shark-- and of course discuss poetry and life. The book has the hair-on-fire gonzo-journalistic style of Hunter Thompson--satiric, profane, rapid-fire, and filled with righteous anger and despair. The poems alternate between raw political diatribes and lyrics celebrating the harsh beauty of the Sonoran Desert.

SONGS FROM WALNUT CANYON brings the reader into a world ofnatural beauty, geological wonder, history, and myth. Most of them actually composed in the canyon, these poems are songs of the present that evoke songs past- in the daily lives and music of those who once inhabited the canyon, and in the voices of Crow, the Corn God, Flute Player, and Last Singer. Walnut Canyon is an extraordinary place. This book attempts both to honor that fact and to suggest why it is. The companion book, GRAND CANYON DAYS, is also availablefrom Xlibris.