Just past Labor Day

the long version

Kirk Robertson is one of Nevada's best-known poets, and rightly so, because his lean verses powerfully express the realities of life in the modern West - its irony, disconnection, sadness, and relentless quest for meaning and a sense of place. Robertson's view is as vast as the landscape itself, and his voice echoes the place - laconic, authentic, rich in irony and the quiet strength of solitary men, full of the harshness and austere power of the High Desert. This new collection incorporates poems selected from Robertson's long and prolific oeuvre with a generous gathering of recent, hitherto-uncollected work. In reading these poems, we understand why Robertson has won his large and far-flung reputation. He is distinctly a poet of Nevada, of the West, but his poems help us locate ourselves, wherever we are.