All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems

by Walter McDonald, Janet M. Neugebauer (Editor)

Winner of the 1993 National Cowboy Hall of Fame Western Heritage Award for Poetry"Ever since discovering Walter McDonald's work, I've been moved by its evocation of the spirit of his native West Texas plains ....... This man knows not only who but where he is, and in a quietly masculine way, with clean, strong, unsentimental words and images, he celebrates that whereness. . . . It is a book worth having, and reading, and rereading time and again. " — John GravesAll That Matters is Walt McDonald's thirteenth collection—seventy five new and selected poems, illustrated with photographs that archivist Janet Neugebauer selected from the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University. Walt has published sixteen other collections of poetry and fiction, including Blessings the Body Gave (Ohio State University Press, 1998), Counting Survivors (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), Night Landings (Harper & Row, 1989), After the Noise of Saigon (University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), and The Flying Dutchman (Ohio State University Press, 1987). Two other books won Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame: The Digs in Escondido Canyon (Texas Tech University Press), and Rafting the Brazos (University of North Texas Press). His book of fiction is A Band of Brothers: Stories from Vietnam (Texas Tech University Press). He was an Air Force pilot and is now director of creative writing at Texas Tech University. He has published more than 1,700 poems in journals including American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Century, First Things, The Formalist, The Georgia Review, Image, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, & The Southern Review. Natives of Texas, he and his wife Carol have three children and seven grandchildren.

154 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 1992

Reviews

[Henry Ainsworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really lovely poetry and photography, also a perfect document of West Texas.