Inside Idaho: Idaho Poems 1996 - 2007

by Charles Potts

Great Blue Heron lands on a poplar snag
Making me wonder momentarily
How a pterodactyl got all the way here
From the late Cretaceous

Until I realize this beautiful bird
Got here the same way the rest of us did:
One egg at a time.

— “Great Blue Heron on a Poplar Snag”

Legendary poet Charles Potts returned to his Idaho roots in two books of poetry, 100 Years in Idaho in 1996 and Lost River Mountain in 1999. These books concentrated on the physical and human geography of his family’s habitation on the land.

The present volume includes two sections taken from these works and three new sections, “Lullaby of the Lochsa,” “Sunburnt Romantic,” and finally “Wild Horse,” written after his wife’s death in a tragic accident in 2004.

In the completed work, Potts’s meditation on family and geographical memory comes full circle. Observant, scrupulous, passionate, and courageous, he describes his life as it embraces the lives and events that came before it.

5½ x 8½ inches • 112 pages • ISBN 978-0-9816693-4-2 • $13.95