At the Ranch is a collection of poems that I brought together in March of 2025. I had a feeling that it was about time to bring out a few more poems together, as I had been conducting my yearly reading and review of poets from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton to Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and many others, and I had been writing a few new poems myself. 

In the cold part of the year, I spend time in a place I call my tavern, an area in a detached garage where I have wood-burning stove. I put in three or four hours at a time, burning chunks of firewood, drinking coffee, and writing poems that I can read aloud without worrying about who is listening. I can also get rid of scrawled pages that don’t go anywhere.

This collection has twenty poems, twelve of them rhymed and the rest unrhymed. Most of the rhymed poems appear in my western stories and novels, in something of the style of the old western movies. The unrhymed poems range in topic from Old West to contemporary subject matter, with a few poems drawn from my experiences working at farm labor in my youth.

For the cover photo, I used a photo that my wife, Rocío, took of me on my horse on my birthday a few months earlier. I had posted it on Facebook, and more than one person said I should use it for a book cover, so I did.

Before this collection came out, I submitted three poems to the WyoPoets members-only contest, and I was surprised to learn that “Field Workers” took first place, while “Girl in the Valley” and “Man of Trees” also placed in the top ten. At the time of this writing, I have three other individual poems submitted in one competition and the collection submitted in another. One cannot put too much stock in contest results, but if anything good happens in this area, it is welcome. My main satisfaction from this collection comes from having a group of readable poems under a single cover and from having readers find them worthwhile.

At the Ranch is available at Amazon.

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