Calling from the Scaffold

Gary Gildner is the author of nearly two dozen poetry collections and works of prose and professor emeritus of English at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Among the many awards Gildner has received for his poetry and short stories are the Robert Frost Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, two National Endowment Fellowships, five Yaddo Fellowships, the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and the William Carlos Williams Prize.

Gary Gildner’s poems possess us quietly, with vivid, heartfelt tales of mountain landscape, family, and friends. Deeply human, ever compassionate, he can feel so close to a character as to speak for her, as in an ambitious sequence of a nun who recalls her past. Gildner engages us with an ear tuned to the music of the line and to the speech of his beloved West, authentic and as fresh as mountain air.