Into Another Time: Grand Canyon Reflections

by Margaret Randall

Margaret Randall describes her long love affair with the Grand Canyon as dating to the summer of 1947 when, lying about her age, her father took her down its trails by mule. Since then, she has returned more than a hundred times to explore its rims, hiking trails, river and side canyons. The poems that make up Into Another Grand Canyon Reflections draw on these experiences as well as on additional research and countless conversations with other canyon lovers. The book's main section emerged from a river trip in 1997. The cover painting and interior line drawings, by Albuquerque painter and public school teacher Barbara Byers, were made on site on the same trip. Margaret and Barbara have been partners for seventeen years. Born in New York in 1936, Randall grew up in New Mexico before living for twenty-three years in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. In Mexico she co-founded and edited El corno emplumado/The Plumed Horn, a vanguard bilingual literary journal of the 1960s. In Cuba and Nicaragua she worked with other artists to contribute to social change. Randall returned to the U.S. in 1984, only to face attacks on her writing that led to an effort to deport her under the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act. After a five-year battle, joined by many of the nation's outstanding artists, writers, unionists, religious leaders, and others, she won her case in 1989.

96 pages, Paperback

First published November 16, 2004

About the author

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist. She has lived for extended periods in Albuquerque, New York, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua. Shorter stays in Peru and North Vietnam were also formative. In the turbulent 1960s she co-founded and co-edited EL CORNO EMPLUMADO / THE PLUMED HORN, a bilingual literary journal which for eight years published some of the most dynamic and meaningful writing of an era. From 1984 through 1994 she taught at a number of U.S. universities.

Margaret was privileged to live among New York’s abstract expressionists in the 1950s and early ’60s, participate in the Mexican student movement of 1968, share important years of the Cuban revolution (1969-1980), the first four years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista project (1980-1984), and visit North Vietnam during the heroic last months of the U.S. American war in that country (1974). Her four children—Gregory, Sarah, Ximena and Ana—have given her ten grandchildren: Lia, Martin, Daniel, Richi, Sebastian, Juan, Luis Rodrigo, Mariana, Eli, and Tolo. She has lived with her life companion, the painter and teacher Barbara Byers, for almost a quarter century.

Reviews

[Leopoldo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poesía contemplativa, cotidiana. Muy de vez en cuando logra una intensidad acumulativa, y su intensidad viene de la profunda intimidad que logra con tan sólo un remate bien colocado.

[Bruce Cline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Evocative poems written by someone who not only intimately knows the Canyon environment, but also its histories, moods, people (both modern an ancient), geology, and some of its secrets.