Time and Place: A Year’s Worth of Musings from Gray Horse Ranch by Lauren de Vore

The setting is a less-traveled shoulder adjoining Northern California’s Mount Diablo, where urban sprawl yields to rolling ranch land tinted emerald during the rainy months and bleached gold the rest of the year. From an oak-dotted landscape shaped by the seasons, Lauren de Vore’s Time and Place invites readers to pause on foot, or watch astride a gray horse, and to interrogate more cerebral terrain emergent from the folds of human gray matter. These sonnets are mature celebrations referencing the tangible and fleeting, subjective and enduring but always accessible sentiments awakened simply by noticing what is before us and responding with humanity to its offerings.

The country called and I, my spirit stirred.

The country called and I, thank god, I heard.

The author’s country sings one song or another into a collection suggesting, in 35 different ways, the shifting rhythms of the natural world. By singing along, we have an opportunity to attune ourselves—the personal: doubt, expectation, aspiration, joy—to elements grand and timeless.

–Robert D. Kirvel is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Chautauqua 2017 Editor’s Prize, 2016 Fulton Prize for the Short Story and 2015 ArtPrize for nonfiction. He has published in the UK, New Zealand and Germany, in translation and anthologies and in a score of U.S. literary journals, such as Arts & Letters. A collection of 22 interrelated stories is slated for publication in London during 2018.