The Call of Glacier Park by Margaret Hasse

I visited Glacier Park in 1955, saw my first glacier, and have chased that inspiration ever since. Margaret Hasse‘s beautiful collection portrays that indescribable presence with poems that are vivid and alive.

–Will Steger, polar explorer and champion for climate action

Margaret Hasse has written a poet’s guidebook to Glacier Park, filled with images that anyone who has had the great luck to hike and camp there will recognize: “bear grass plumes,” switchbacks, huckleberries. Yet, just as in the best travels, these poems offer the unexpected—a “crepuscular sow” coming out of her cave in spring, a list of specific healing properties of wildflowers, streams tossing “their jumble of silver off the sides of ridges,” and animals who might interpret our recent passing as “smelly ghosts”—opening our eyes to the fresh and miraculous properties of life on earth.

–Melissa Kwasny, Poet Laureate of Montana and author of Pictograph and Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, among others

Margaret Hasse’s poetry brings back a wealth of memories of my lifetime of adventures in Glacier National Park. As a park historian, I used a 1926 diary and a photo album of Gladys Johnson, Margaret’s mother, to create a display (hosted by East Glacier Lodge) about Gladys as a young woman in the park. Gladys’ descriptions are vibrant. Margaret’s poems show that the daughter inherited her mother’s physical spunk and way with words

–John Chase, teacher and historian

In The Call of Glacier Park Margaret Hasse takes you along a winding trail into the deep and mystical wilderness of the place where her mother once worked and hiked the trails. Her words, always elegant and perfectly chosen, brim with emotion and promise. Take this journey with her.

–Bill Meissner, author of The Mapmaker’s Dream, Circling Toward Home, andLight at the Edge of the Field, among others