Our Blue Earth

“Years ago, moving from California to Wisconsin, I saw a highway sign for Blue Earth, and in that instant knew that town’s evocative name was the title of my next book. Life in the town itself was a mystery. Now I read Richard Carr’s mysterious and musical poetry that records the voices of residents of Our Blue Earth, where he grew up. He invites us to dwell on the farm, to hunt the deep woods, to be in bed in the house great-grandfather built and be a dreaming boy who is ‘the storm approaching.’ The man, whose mother ‘didn’t want to raise a country boy’ and drives him 100 miles each way to see the Messiah, will not stay on the farm to harvest with his hands, but Carr’s harvest is his poetry, Our Blue Earth’s family memory, grit and hard work, ghosts, dream, deer who speak from snow and corn stubble, a cornucopia for our souls.”
—Aliki Barnstone

“The poems in Richard Carr’s powerfully engaging Our Blue Earth rise from the often troubled and troubling shadows of a childhood and youth spent on a family farm. Here is a landscape of conflicted reminiscence, of toil and mud, where storms meddle in human affairs and ‘night hauls its groggy paunch across the plains.’ Here too are portraits of a distant mother parceling out morsels of maternal care and a father in whose voice his son can hear ‘the god of winds and storm’—a god who nonetheless will ‘let the barn fall down / and disappear.’ But Carr’s project in Our Blue Earth is ultimately that of retrieval, both of the light and the dark, at which he succeeds admirably in these poems of lyric grace and subtle rhyme.”
—Richard Foerster