Abstract

These new and selected poems of the West Texas plains are as spare, vital, and impassioned as the people who settled there. Perhaps that is why they underscore so dramatically the surprisingly poetic content of the archival photographs with which they are paired. Rarely has such a collaboration - of history and invention proved so felicitous. Never has a landscape been portrayed in more human terms, nor so arrestingly. McDonald's myriad images - hawks frozen to fence posts during a blizzard; cows grazing during a rain storm; kids following the railroad tracks in search of flattened pennies; ranch hands sitting down to rattlesnake chili; the moon rising over a crowded football stadium; and old men slapping mosquitoes as they fish - are so real they are palpable. Together the photographs and poems are much more than the sum of their parts. All That Matters is a multidimensional tableau of what it took to settle these plains.