Review by Martha Quillen
Poetry – January 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
Glass-eyed Paint in the Rain
by Laurie Wagner Buyer
Published in 1996
by High Plains Press
ISBN 0-931271-40-1
Laurie Wagner Buyer lives on a ranch near Fairplay, and her poetry definitely reflects her home. In some places, her poetry brings to mind the chill winds, blowing snow, manifest beauty, and inherent loneliness of South Park so vividly it can downright make you shiver.
The promo material that came with our copy of Glass-eyed Paint talks about Buyer’s numerous achievements as both a cowboy poet and a nature poet. The segment about Glass-eyed Paint in the Rain says:
Laurie Wagner Buyer’s poetry is as fresh and invigorating as a mountain stream in the high Colorado mountains where she makes her home. She writes about connections and what we discover about ourselves by reaching for those connections.
The land, the people and animals that inhabit the land, and the inter-relationships of the three — those are the things that Laurie Buyer is passionate about, in her life and in her poetry.
“I wasn’t born to the land,” Laurie Wagner Buyer says. “I came West because I fell in love with a man, and I stayed because I fell in love with the land…”
“… She writes of elk in aspen, of gathering mint, of beaver on Mud Creek, of skiing into a storm, and of horses, including the glass-eyed paint of the title poem.”
A quote by Linda Hussa, author of Ride the Silence, was also included with the advance copy. She says:
“Laurie Buyer has brought the myth of the ranch woman home for supper. Her poetry makes sense of the struggle. While the soup stirs steam and bread bends the toweling with a yeasty fragrance, Laurie tells the story of her living. I, for one, need what she has to say.”
I include these excerpts because they’re pretty good descriptions of Buyer’s book. Yet nonetheless, I was surprised by Glass-eyed Paint in the Rain.
Although living with nature and being a ranch wife loom large in Buyer’s work, the poems actually explore a far more universal reality. With soul-baring poignancy, Buyer seems to be searching for the meaning behind being a woman, a mother, and a human being. Take the first verse of A Good Woman,for example:
A good woman sticks,
solid, unswerving,
molds herself to her man,
cooks and cleans and sews,
grows a garden to save on groceries,
rides whenever she can and
tries to rope, nurses calves,
fusses with chickens and rabbits
and children; she births and bathes and
beds, believing that somehow
her love can hold it all
together.
And the last verse concludes:
A good woman sticks,
bends, gives, grieves in silence
until she comes
apart.
In short, although this book certainly includes nature poetry, often rich in its descriptions of wildlife and landscape, the collection makes you reflect a lot more upon the inner turmoil of existence than upon the wonders of scenery. Buyer writes emotionally about loving, learning, coping, succeeding, and failing. And here and there, she also offers a touch of humor, as in Madge, which begins:
They say she whacked off her hair
and crammed on a hat,
dressed like a man,
cussed and chewed,
married her hired hands
so she wouldn’t have to
pay ’em any wages,
told ’em if they wanted
smokes and booze
to get off their butts
and trap for cash.
When they left, fed up,
she just married another,
outliving them all
until she dropped dead
of a heart attack
in front of the old wood range
while building biscuits.
With a dash of comic irony, the narrator goes on to muse about living in the house where Madge once lived. But in this book, Buyer doesn’t deliver any of the deep, belly laughs found in some Cowboy poetry. Instead, A Glass-eyed Paint in the Rain is a reflective and moving collection.
All in all, the book struck me as a uniquely interesting look at age-old themes from a rather different and distinctive perspective — a perspective that should appeal not just to fans of western nature poetry, but to all poetry enthusiasts.
–Martha Quillen