THIRD PLACE, WILL ROGERS MEDALLION AWARD, RECORDED POERTY, 2023
This is a collection of western poetry written and presented by John D. Nesbitt. This is spoken poetry with no music. Trails and Crossings contains 21 original poems ranging from traditional ballads to unrhymed poems to sonnets. These are poems about the trail and range and about human nature. Overall, the poems have a quality of bittersweet realism that readers have come to know in John D. Nesbitt’s novels and short stories.
Most of these poems are available in printed form in Nesbitt’s Thorns on the Rose, and about half of them were recorded as songs by W.C. Jameson on the CD In a Large and Lonesome Land (2018). One of the poems, “Rangeland Lament,” was recorded by Carol Markstrom on her Desert Rose album (2018). Nesbitt is a multiple winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award and of the Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award. The longest poem on this CD, “Prairie Center,” won the Spur Award for Best Western Poem in 2019.
“It’s easy to picture a cowboy singing some of these verses while night-herding, but “Ella Watson” reveals that Nesbitt can write in free verse, too. Nesbitt has an ear for19th Century language, and, had Nesbitt been born in the 1800s, Jack Thorp probably would have collected many of these songs/poems in Songs of the Cowboys (1908).”-Roundup Magazine
“Wyoming’s awarded poet and author John D. Nesbitt has come out with a collection of works that covers a lot of literary territory. . . More than one of these poems might qualify as mini-novels.” -The Western Way