Going Back to Bisbee

May 4, 1992
Poet Shelton has created a powerful annal of place--a paean to the Sonoran desert south of Tucson, a landscape as prickly as the cacti that grow in it and yet as refreshing as a rainy-season rainstorm. Shelton imbues landscapes, flora and fauna with resonance, imprinting themes of memory, history and human nature in the reader's mind. The opening description of a Sonoran monsoon is a masterful evocation of weather, vibrant and violent. Shelton's ( The Tattooed Desert ) tour of the desert includes descriptions of a six-foot snake that rescued him from the local squirrels who were infiltrating his house; his disastrous attempt to harvest a yucca as a native Christmas tree; an attack by raging bulls on the Mormon battalion in the U.S.-Mexican war; his abrupt discovery of an adobe ghost town; and the sociology of an old mining village. Shelton knows the lore and the life of Southern Arizona, and his diction, both precise and evocative, reflects his poetic skills. Indeed, the only fault here could easily have been repaired: the end of the book tends to repeat observations made earlier.

July 1, 1992
This book, winner of the 1992 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, offers the reader a glimpse into life and landscape in a mountainous mining region in extreme southeastern Arizona. Shelton, the author of several works of poetry ( The Bus to Veracruz, LJ 12/15/78. o.p.; The Tattooed Desert, LJ 2/15/71) became enraptured with the area as an army draftee and stayed to teach junior high English in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Now living in Tucson, he recounts a recent nostalgic journey back to the area that incorporates natural history with a marvelous sense of place. This book should appeal to fans of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness ( LJ 1/1/68) and Charles Bowden's Desierto: Memories of the Future ( LJ 6/15/91). Recommended, especially for southwestern and natural history collections.-- Tim Markus, Evergreen State Coll. Lib., Olympia, Wash.

Copyright 1992 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 1992
Poet Shelton's first nonfiction book has won the 1992 Western States Book Award and will go on to win the hearts of readers everywhere, particularly those who share his love of the desert and fascination with life's myriad incongruities. Shelton ended up in southern Arizona when he was drafted and stationed at Fort Huachuca in the late 1950s. When he finished his stint, he took a teaching job in Bisbee, a hilly little mining town. Shelton's Bisbee years were germinal ones and, as the years passed, the town became a symbol of his youth and inspiration, a place worthy of a pilgrimage. Shelton's personal quest evolved into a universal tale incorporating elements of an on-the-road narrative, a selective memoir, and an engrossing anecdotal meandering through the history of southeastern Arizona's plants, animals, and people. As he drives his old blue van across the Sonora desert, Shelton regales his rapt readers with hilarious stories of encounters with diabolical desert plants and proud desert creatures and the often rabid activities of Mexicans and Anglos. He's a magician, hypnotizing his audience one moment with a tribute to coyotes, then waking them to a discussion of the Apache wars. Now he conjures a drifting veil of "walking rain," now the glory of an agave in bloom, and now the ruins of copper and silver mines. Shelton possesses great generosity of soul, a gift for observation, and a golden sense of humor. ((Reviewed July 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)