Critical praise for Magpie Rising

"Magpie Rising is clearly the work of a poet, both in the formal meaning of someone who writes verse and in the metaphorical designation of a quality of mind. Gilfillan has a keen and wonderfully accurate sense of place and, what's more rare, a sense of the relationship of place to time. He wields his many literary allusions lightly, never draws up short before seeming trivia, and is both tough-minded and sweetly lyrical, each at the proper time. As judges, we couldn't have wished for a worthier book with which to inaugerate the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction."

"I think it was Magpie Rising that first introduced me to the work of Merrill Gilfillan and sent me into the kind of enthusiasm of fandom that I bought and sent to friends over twenty copies of Burnt House to Paw Paw. Magpie Rising haunts by ordinary means, surely the most difficult thing a writer can attempt, and surely a test for the highest level of the writer's art. Merrill Gilfillan fits right in up there at the top."

"There comes a morning every spring," writes Merrill Gilfillan in "Magpie Rising," "a morning whose light is just so - when the first solid thought to enter the mind is drive. It's as predictable as lilacs and the return of the big flocks. It never fails to quash any conceivable competition: Today will be spent at the wheel, going nowhere in particular." Mr. Gilfillan has obeyed the compulsion that comes from that thought over the years and has given us a book of word pictures he has made while crisscrossing the Great Plains from the Texas Panhandle in the south to Alberta and Saskatchewan in the north. There are animals and shimmering views recorded in loving detail. He is a close and accurate watcher of birds, and the book is filled with them. He camps out and stays in small-town motels, and everywhere he asks questions and collects odd facts and bits of history to add to his observations. He remembers the Native Americans who were here before and laments the loss of their stories, their songs, their view of the world. In towns and hamlets he watches for the telling image, the person or place that stands for the rest. This book is, in fact, made up of images of paragraph or page length. They are on the face of it unrelated, and Mr. Gilfillan, who was born in the Midwest, leaves it to the reader to make the connection. This is a poet's method. And this is a book to be read as a poet's experiment in prose, slowly and with attention to the language: "Where U.S. 34 crosses the North Republican a brown thrasher sings: multidimensional intersection and coordinate point of June crux potent as astrological gearage. To be born at this juncture bodes starry nights and puckered lips in chokecherry time. . . ."

Merrill Gilfillan was born in Ohio in 1945, and raised there. He attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 1967, where he won the Major Hopwood Prize for poetry in his senior year. He attended the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop for two years, studying with Ted Berrigan, Anslem Hollo, and George Starbuck among others. He lived and worked in New York City for eight years, and then moved to Colorado, where he wrote feature stories for Boulder/Denver newspapers. His first book of essays, Magpie Rising; Sketches from the Great Plains, won the first PEN/Martha Albrand Award for non-fiction in 1989. He makes his home in Colorado.

Other books by Merrill Gilfillan

Burnt House to Paw Paw, Hard Press, 1997
Sworn Before Cranes, Crown Publishing, 1994

Awards and Honors:

1967 Major Hopwood Prize, University of Michigan
1989 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Non-fiction (Magpie Rising)
1994 Ohiana Fiction Award (Sworn Before Cranes)
1994 Colorado Book Awards Finalist (Sworn Before Cranes)