Critical Commentary
“Laurie Wagner Buyer is on a great bridal journey, wedding the songs in her heart to the music she finds in the mountains and prairies and deserts of the American West. The result is lyrical poetry and prose that captures a woman's life in the West, and lifts the reader into realms of beauty and kinship. A trip down the Grand Canyon tests the mettle of all who ride the breast of the Colorado River. But it does more: it washes away what is false in relationships and in the secret heart, often painfully but sometimes sweetly. [In Side Canyons ] Laurie’s account of her trip through those cloistered and shadowed confines of river and heart is more than compelling; it is the odyssey of the soul. Of all the books written about living in the modern West, this one comes closest to the sun.”
--Richard S. Wheeler, author of Spur Award Winner Masterson
“At a time when far too many poets stand at center stage pointing their fingers at themselves, never in Red Colt Canyon do we get the impression that Laurie Wagner Buyer thinks she is more important than the outer world she writes about, or more important than her readers, for that matter. For example, in ‘Horse Barn on a Winter Day,’ we don’t have to push the poet out of the doorway in order to see what’s going on inside the barn. It is a great pleasure to be in the company of this talented, generous, and humble witness.”
--Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate of the United States
“The images in Glass-eyed Paint in the Rain are fresh, unmannered, brain-lingering lines from a genuinely brilliant writer. . .There is not an ill-chosen word, much less a dull line, in this extraordinary book. Laurie Wagner Buyer writes of the West and from a woman’s perspective but her gender and geography are really meaningless in the bigger picture: she is a splendid poet and that is enough to say.”
--Dale L. Walker, Rocky Mountain News, February 2, 1997.
“Braintanning Buckskin is one of the most original poems I’ve ever read--beautifully conceived and crafted, with simple, graceful eloquence. Much more than an ‘art tool’ this poem is truly a work of art.”
--Anne H. Widmark, author ofBetween Earth and Sky
“Blue Heron is an elegant series of a city-born ranch woman’s songs to the earth. Each time I open it I cry, for the beauty of its sparseness and lack of pretension as much as the sometimes icy, sometimes warm-blooded realities of living within cattle culture. The poems stretch your mind as well as your legs, traipsing around behind her daily treks through her world. I think hers is a courageous voice, brave enough to talk about death without remonstration, brave enough not to strive to be something else. There is a very human quality to Buyer’s writing that runs through every page.”
--Trudy Wischemann, South Valley Arts, December 1995.
“Laurie Wagner Buyer is a fine poet. . .her work stands on its own merits. . .and. . .she has plenty to say. Through her work, she is providing a bridge between the highly personal, introspective, self-centered world-view that describes so much of this past century’s poetry, and a larger view that encompasses the natural world and puts us back in it. The temper of her vision is needed in today’s poetry.”
--Andy Wilkinson, in a letter of recommendation for the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute, Denver, Colorado, February 19, 1997.
