Salting the Boundaries

Salting the Boundaries, 2014, New Native Press.

“I’m glad I cleared the desktop and spread out and read all of SALTING THE BOUNDARIES this evening. These are all new poems to me, and new in tone, style, vocabulary. The breadth of knowledge and concern, mythopoetic, geologic, historic, et al is splendid. & your wild salmon poem: I’m so glad you did that. I had been idly dreaming of something like that for years but never got to it. This is an impressive gathering, and a welcome surprise for me.”—Gary Snyder

As a kind of stewardship and seasonal ritual, Dale Pendell takes us through the four seasons at his home in the Sierra foothills of northern California as he “salts the boundaries” of his property and his life, “keeping them clean,” as he puts it. No stranger to ancient culture(s) or rituals, the author writes a modern poetry that is, at once, contemporary and Celtic in its detail and focus on cultural and environmental sustainability (or the lack thereof). Drawing a circle around the seasons, Pendell finishes this poem-cycle with poems of winter. In his preface to the winter section he writes, “In California and other ‘Mediterranean’ climates, winter is when it rains. Fires are in the stove. It’s a good time for writing, and books.”