Yesterday at Woodland Pattern found Western Love and Dear Dad, by Bill Luoma. One was in the chap stacks. (Shit's rough in the chap stacks.) The other was in the much more plush drawers for the rare small press stuff. But Bill Luoma's books hang out wherever. Some of the Western Love poems are at the Po Pro website to be read. Bill Luoma's writing seems to be changing all the time. In My Trip To NYC, its chatty detail and journaling, and catching everything in the process with the enhanced facilities of someone who's maximally alive. Also in Works & Days, there's engine trouble, looking for new cleats. I think how to oil a new glove is covered in both Works & Days and Dear Dad. And then the stuff I read in Bay Poetics, intensity on a Coolidge tip. I think he writes online poems in code too.

Western Love has what a cowboy troubador might call little ditties, like this:

My bedroll is wet
with morning dew.
I must find my breakfast.
Nuts and berries are
plentiful, but the brush
is rustling with
animal sound.

Or this:

The cook returns
the ladle to the chuck
wagon. O friendly
ground, tonight you’ll
substitute for my lover.

Alot of these poems seem to me to have the quality of a note left out for someone, like the famous William Carlos Williams poem, This Is Just To Say. Of course WCW wrote many that have this feel but this is the one that came to mind:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

Also Spicer's Billy The Kid and George Stanley's Western poems come to mind. But this one has WCWness to it:
Remember the buffalo
bread you baked? I’ve
never met a better baker.
You sure can shoot, too
and throw a steer
on its side at the rodeo.

Luoma's poems here are a little more appealingly goofy. I don't know whether one can find 'buffalo bread' anywhere. The poems work quite well as a sequence, that is they achieve a cumulitive effect.