Sagebrush Songs

Sagebrush Songs arises from the northern New Mexico landscape, remote and unique. The headwaters of the Rio Grande and one of its major tributaries, the Rio Chama, originate in the southern Rocky Mountains. A high desert plateau stretches between the Tusas and Sangre de Christo ranges in this mountain system. The Rio Grande rift, a major continental rift zone, runs through the plateau. As a transitional zone between alpine forests and shortgrass prairie, the sagebrush mesa supports diverse animal and plant communities. A scenic roadway around Wheeler Peak, the highest point in New Mexico, circumscribes the Enchanted Circle a few miles north of the Taos Pueblo.

 

The ancient Chinese understanding of Tao reveres mountains and rivers as expressions of yin and yang, the energies that animate fundamental creative material.  Tao, or “the Way,” understood mountains and rivers in terms of the energies that continually generate and regenerate all things as they emerge from and recede into empty absence. Classical Chinese poetry meditates on such landscape features and their empty spaces. Learning to be present in northern New Mexico enables me to understand why this is so. Sagebrush Songs is my celebration of its mountains and rivers, manifestations of the Way of all things.

 

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“Lee’s sensory snapshots of the desert render a deep understanding of the shape-shifting that occurs over millennia in the world of nature, both sustaining and healing its human guests. Reminiscent of Mary Oliver’s attention to detail, Lee’s desert poems span a wide range of insights, from defining the inexplicable pull of the mountains that drives us toward exploration, to cataclysmic forest fires that change the course of the natural world, and, in turn, change us.”

-Sarah Stecher, award-winning Oklahoma poet

 

“Lee’s poems sing of the desert—it’s beauty, chameleon-like moods and how it can both embrace and be unmoved. These ‘songs’ are an upwelling from one who has lived in and witnessed the shades of desert life. The reader will find here an array of depictions that deeply sate the inner eye.”

-Judith Chibante Neal, Ed.D., Professor Emerita, California State University, Fresno, Author, Radio In the Night

 

“In Sagebrush Songs those of us who have only experienced the desert from the windows of a car are offered an unique opportunity. Margaret Lee’s extraordinary talent for description allows us to enter that desert world. To wrap ourselves in it. To breathe its very breath.”

-Carol Lavelle Snow, award-winning poet, author of Dream Catcher

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