A Death at Tollgate Creek

Art Elser's poetry has been published in Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone, Owen Wister Review, High Plains Register, The Human Touch, Science Poetry, The Avocet, Vietnam War Poetry, and Proud to Be. His chapbook, We Leave the Safety of the Sea, received the Colorado Authors' League Poetry award for 2014. A collection of his poetry in High Plains Register received the Colorado Authors' League Poetry award in 2016. His latest book of poetry is A Death at Tollgate Creek (2017).

A Death at Tollgate Creek sings not only of the beauty of the prairie's vast open spaces, its forever skies, its tawny sea of grasses, its graceful critters, but also of the struggles of man and animal to survive in its harsh and unforgiving environment. They tell of the fate of the Cheyenne, the buffalo herds, and the early settlers. And we learn of the play of a coyote pup, the speed and grace of the pronghorn, hear the coyote's howl, the wind in the grass, the blue sky in the goose's wings, the crickets, the meadowlark. Its songs are a hymn to the seasons of the prairie. The poems in A Death at Tollgate Creek evoke the spirit of the high plains, its sand lilies, prairie grasses, coyotes, rattlesnakes, pronghorn, thundering buffalo herds, the Cheyenne Indians who once hunted them, the ferocity of its storms, and crickets singing in the peacefulness of the prairie under a full moon. The reader is asked to imagine the fate of the homesteaders who once lived, loved, and perhaps died there and to consider the cycles of nature, birth, life, and death that is ever present. The reader is invited to love the prairie as the poet does.