Peter Anderson returns to his place-based verse and situates it in his cherished San Luis Valley at the western edge of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in Riding the Wheel: Prose-Poems, published this summer by independent literary press Kelsay Books.

Anderson and his family live in Crestone, Colorado, from where he penned the road trip guidebook, Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide (2023), winner of the 2024 Colorado Book Award.

In 2017, he helped launch the Crestone Poetry Festival, which gathers annually in October for a four-day celebration of poetry workshops and readings.

Riding the Wheel begins as Anderson is hunkering down to write during COVID. He is sheltering, like his neighbors, like his family in “the land that goes back and forth …  up and down,” where his moods and observations shift like the sands at nearby Great Sand Dunes National Park. Anderson takes solace in his words, in his “little town at the end of the road.” He comments on his neighbors. Some choose the quiet of an abandoned chapel, because no one goes there anymore. Others prefer to hike, “prancing around like puppies …  runnin’ their stink off.”  This is where he trusts himself most, “on the edge of the Sangre de Cristos, [where] east is wild and steep, west is open and rural, and north and south” are public lands.

The book is composed of four separate sections: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. Each begins with a haiku series in the “round.” These are his time wheel, a carousel that spins the reader off, traversing four distinct seasons in four distinct directions. Anderson guides us as his hands grip the wheel along a bumpy road. His verse courses his own life, “own tracks / snow, road, distant yellow bus / fifty years from here.”

In “The Cosmic Highway,” Anderson speaks of mirages. Caused by a “winter inversion, when a layer of cold air traps the vapors rising from high desert wetlands, the visions begin.” The poet wonders what is real and what is perceived. Is his little town’s reality mere elastic or is nature expanding the universe itself?  Anderson is a master at describing these liminal spaces.

In “Postcards to Blanca Peak,” these epistolary poems are love letters to his local fourteener.  At 14,351 feet she reigns on high, and he, like all who live in her shadow, kneels upon her foothills. Anderson’s poem retells Diné legend which explains that First Woman and First Man brought her up from the underworld and fastened her to the ground with rainbows and lightning bolts. Every summer monsoon is a reminder how she has become tethered to her sacred place upon this earth-map.

Throughout the collection, it seems Anderson’s preferred form is haiku.  In “Haibun for a Cool Trail” the poet begins in prose, describing his favorite paths that lead from sand into arroyo, along ponderosa and winding through patches of prickly pear cactus. He shapeshifts into haiku as the trail opens upon a meadow where:

Rabbitbrush holds on

to the last light, then gives it

up to the mountain.

Anderson understands that his presence is minor within the massive grandeur of nature.

This he describes in “Gleaning,” referencing the migratory path of sandhill cranes that “circle above the valley before settling,” their cyclical trajectory set. They fly west and south to New Mexico in winter.  They fly east and north in summer. They emerge like storm clouds over the Río Grande and are heard before they are seen. These patterns are like our own. They continue and repeat, season after season, a continuity reminding us that no matter what happens, life goes on.

So, for Anderson, this place—Crestone, below Mount Blanca—within the San Luis Valley is, “a good place to be lost.” His perfection, his paradise is walking sandy two-tracks with his dog toward eastbound storm clouds across the valley. Here he has learned he has walked far enough and takes the advice of the mountain:

Make yourself at home,

said the mountain, so the clouds

lay down for the night.

Through repetition and sense of time, Anderson has learned and is learning to “ride the wheel.” His observations bring calm certainty, “since the aspens will leaf out … since the bluebirds will be hatching … since the elk will be bugling, … since the first flurries of snow will drift.” Each season has its purpose and “we will notice [its] big wheel of life turning.” Time is a shapeless medium more circular than linear. Its liminal space offers hope, even in precarious times, because it will begin again and again and again.