The Reluctant Hunter

THE RELUCTANT HUNTER won the Texas Writers Recognition Award for poetry, a grant of $2000 toward publication of this book, sponsored by the Texas Commission On Arts and presented by the Texas Institute Of Letters. The first edition was published by Latitudes Press in 1989. THE RELUCTANT HUNTER is a collection of sixty poems, covering a span of twenty years. The setting is West Texas at its best and at its worst. There is a subtext of the hunter moving from an over-persuaded spouse to a devotee of the sport. In the beginning, she sat in a deer blind with a shotgun on her left and a rifle on her right, doing what she loved to do best in the world, dreaming with a pen in her hand and a notebook in her lap writing poetry. She was a city girl who loved concrete and indoor plumbing, but sometime during those twenty seasons she fell in love with the spreading oaks, the kalechi roads, the scrubby mesquite-covered hills, the rustic old cabin, and last but far from least, the simple pleasures of hunting with her husband on their deer lease in Brackettville.