Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-329) and index.
Sand, wind, and buttes: Peggy Pond Church's lifetime love affair with the desert Southwest -- Hootin' and hollerin' in the Rocky Mountain West: cowboy poetry, the land, and the modern reader -- A terrible beauty: the Alaskan wilderness and the poetry of John Haines -- Dispossessed: the poetic inferno of Adrian C. Louis -- Surf, rivers, and salmon: the Northwest in the poetry of Richard Hugo -- California as the world in the poetry of Jane Hirshfield