Taos Mountain
$60.00
By Robert Sund
Edited and with an afterword by Glenn Hughes
Robert Sund Poet’s House Press
Taos Mountain is the third full-length book of poems by the celebrated Northwest poet, painter, and calligrapher Robert Sund (1929-2001). Faithful to Sund’s stated wishes, it was posthumously edited from a sizable manuscript written during a three-month stay in Taos, New Mexico, during the Spring of 1991.
The close attention to nature and the celebration of craft and meditation that have always characterized Sund’s poetry are here brought to bear on the landscape of Taos, its surroundings, and its people. As in his earlier work, a poetry of exuberance and delight in creative work, of fresh perception and quiet longing, and of harmony between human beings and nature, is at times leavened by poems of lamentation over spiritual forgetfulness and loss. The result is a sharply-etched, mature poetic response to a unique place and its unique people, as well as a distinctive vision of timeless beauty and wisdom.
This special, first edition of Taos Mountain is illustrated with seventeen high-quality digital reproductions of Sund’s paintings, the majority of them examples of the delicately beautiful “blanket paintings” that he began to create while in Taos. They complement and extend the vision of this poetry, with its recurrent imagery of weaver and loom and colored thread, and of spiritual presence in craft, landscape, and dream.
Taos Mountain is a welcome addition to Sund’s two earlier award-winning collections, Bunch Grass (1969) and Ish River (1983).
Hard cover, 7.25″ x 11″, 112 pages, 16 paintings. $60