These ragged sketches of ranch life along the Wyoming-Colorado border depict the author's neighbors-hardscrabble folk-in wry, stoic stories of skill, survival and loss that flash back and forth across 100 years of the high meadow's history. Other have done a better job than I ever could. I am having a hard time writing this review, because this book is so spare, so intricate, so spellbinding that I struggle to find the words to give even a minimal conception of the scope and breadth and depth of it.

Be sure to have your copy of Hamlet on hand so you can check up on Lyle's observation. If you have a soft spot for Colorado and Wyoming and you enjoy reading about ranch life, give this one a try. He makes some striking comparisons that created powerful images for me, such as when he describes a sunset 'turning the sky as many pastels as you see on the side of a rainbow trout.' James Galvin is best known for his poetry, and that poetic bent really comes through in both his dialogue and his artful word pictures of nature's beauty. That's evidence enough for me of a connection with real life. The book jacket illustration is attributed to Clara Van Waning. The central character, Lyle Van Waning, is just too real (and lovable) to be a complete fabrication. It took me most of the book to figure out that it's 'faction.' The Jimmy Galvin of the novel is the author, and the other characters are clearly fictionalized versions of people he knew well. It's essentially plotless, and non-linear in the extreme. The book is beautifully and heartfully written, but be forewarned. The life requires great hardiness and ingenuity to withstand the isolation and trials of snow, wind, fire, hunger, disease, and financial uncertainty. It follows about a century's-worth of people's doin's in a mountain meadow at 8,500 feet in southern Wyoming. This is a quiet, thoughtful read for those of us who have a strong heart connection with the high sagebrush country of the inter-mountain West.

'Often I am permitted to return to a meadow.'

The Meadow by James Galvin