Color of Mourning

the long version

The reader will be taken on an odyssey including sixteenth-century England, the ancient hills of Spain, a Renoir painting in Ft. Worth, a precarious cliff side inn on California's Highway One, a rare-book library in the heart of Houston, a high-school gym in Georgia, an East Texas pine forest, and the violet crowned hills of Austin. The forays collected in this volume always return to Texas, most notably Austin, where the power of childhood memories shed light on the author's life experiences during the pivotal periods of the sixties and seventies. Examples include poems chronicling the day of the University of Texas tower sniper tragedy and the award winning poem "Night Hawk," recording the time that the poet ran face to chest into LBJ in a popular restaurant, a poem, like the writer's collection, recapturing unique and complicated times with irony, wit, and joyful mourning.