Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains

Barn Owl Books, 1987. Book Club Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 92x8x140. Pofcher, Ellen, and Diamond, Sandy. South Dakota is a land where the only rule is "you can never tell what a bobtail cow will do." In the winter, the temperature can drop to minus fifty-six - if the wind only blows twenty-five miles an hour. Spring means getting up at ten p.m., midnight, and two a.m. to check on pregnant cows. Snow storms at the end of April can decimate a vegetable garden. In the summer, you can spend fourteen hours a day haying and the rest of the time watching for fires. Then there's canning, drying, and freezing to get ready for winter again. Highlights the rancher's struggle with natural elements and affords a look at the forces that shape a poet. Hasselstrom, rancher, poet, wife, and environmentalist, blends the practical with the poetic in her well-crafted book. Haying, fence mending, and cattle branding are described, along with the more dramatic occurences of ranch lifeblizzards, prairie fires, cattle births, and deaths. In between are reflective moments when the poet pauses at the sight of a meteor shower or laughs over the irony of making garden mulch out of old love letters. Readers will not have to be nature smitten, or even particularly interested in ranching, to relate to Hasselstrom's warm, intelligent voice. This is the kind of book that is so authentically well written that readers will find themselves reading straight through the appending glossary of ranching terms because they don't want the book to end. They will also want to leaf back through the 16 poems that are included in the text. A uniquely uplifting and informative slice of life. Linda M. Hasselstrom combines forty-five years of experience raising cattle on the Northern Plains with thirty years as an environmental activist to create essays and poetry, and co-edit anthologies that make a significant contribution to environmental writing today. She is the author or editor of twelve books including Woven on the Wind, Feels Like Far, and Leaning into the Wind. She has received a number of honors for her work including an NEA fellowship for poetry and the South Dakota Hall of Fame's Writer of the Year award.