Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains

By Merrill Gilfillan

Book Overview

The rolling, billowing, delicate landscape of Nebraska's Sandhills; the tombstone of Billy the Kid--stolen so often that it must be caged and shackled--in Fort Sumner, New Mexico; an intercontinental ballistic missile trundling down a highway under heavy guard in Weld County, Colorado; cottonwoods and cranes, faded hotels and abandoned trailers painted aqua and purple; the ghosts of Pawnees, Cheyennes, and Kiowas and generations of settlers whose descendants now grouse in a caf in Heimdahl, North Dakota, or roar off to a bikers convention in Sturgis, South Dakota. These are some of the things that catch Merrill Gilfillan's eye and ear in this radiant collection of essays. Written with a poetic economy that often attains grandeur, Magpie Rising is an exhilarating tour of the Great Plains--its geography, wildlife, history, mythology, and food, its vast spaces and weirdly synchronous time. This is nature writing at its most evocative and insightful.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803271077
• ISBN13: 9780803271074
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The best essays

This book is the best compilation of words on the great plains that I know of. The author simply leaves you feeling as if you are there. That's what a good read should do.

Collage of field notes . . .

This book is a collection of the author's notes, impressions, vignettes, short essays and verbal fragments (he calls them "sketches"). They were written during 1983-86 as Gilfillian crisscrossed the Great Plains from Canada to Texas (he says he drove 50,000 miles), stopping here and there - sometimes in cities and small towns, sometimes off-road - to take out a sharpened pencil and note what was there to be "noticed." Gilfillian is a poet with language, and his perceptions are informed by a wide knowledge of music, literature and civilizations past and present. Each piece can be read multiple times, like poems, to wring more meaning and feeling from them. The stories he draws on from Indian history are often compelling. And I especially enjoyed his longer essay on the Nebraska Sandhills, along with thoughts about the Nebraska writers Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz. Recommended reading for anyone fascinated by the vastness of the high plains and its impact on those who have lived there - in a splendid kind of isolation. Also recommended: Ian Frazier's "Great Plains."