This vivid collection of poems by Emmanuel Merle, in Peter Brown's splendid translation, is at once a travelogue of the American West and a French poet's lyric diary. The poet's psyche, searching self-admittedly for truth, is as full of life and strange beauty as the very places that it explores and blends with. This continent's historical past, with its deplorable injustices against the Native American population, emerges here in a fresh and powerful light for the American reader. - Philip Nikolayev