On the Right Wind - Couverture souple

Ripley Hugo was born in Michigan and raised on the east side of the Continental Divide in Great Falls, Montana. After twenty years of teaching at universities and colleges across the country, she returned in 1973 to live in Montana with her two children, Matthew and Melissa, and married the poet Richard Hugo. She taught literature and creative writing at the University of Montana and worked for twelve years for the Montana Poets in the Schools program. Her early poems are published in a chapbook, MAPPING MY FATHER, from Dooryard Press. In 2003, the University of Nebraska Press published WRITING FOR HER LIFE: THE NOVELIST MILDRED WALKER, a biography of Ripley's mother. She lives in Missoula.

Ripley Hugo is sublime. Tough as whang leather, full of whismy and grief, when she sings her plains song, it's pitch perfect. If I'd known from the start/I'd return to this river bank/ every year of my breath, / I might have made plans,/ said yes to my bones/ and the heron stalking the reed. Pragmatic, wry, her poems teach us how to live on this humble earth, how to become each year more richly, raggedly human. --Sandra Alcosser, author of EXCEPT BY NATURE

Ripley Hugo's poems ring strong and clear and they do what great poems should do: they distill past and present into single, lyrical moments filled with unforgettable, closely observed details--a woman at a kitchen sink, firefighters at a worn pine table, a man and boy building fence--and inscribed in those smaller stories is all the pain and music and echoes of the larger stories in which they are embedded. I have waited a long time for this collection and I celebrate its arrival. --Caroline Patterson, editor of MONTANA WOMEN WRITERS: A GEOGRAPHY OF THE HEART

Here are poems that recall us to the stern and gorgeous rhythms of life, and the end of life, on an earth made unforgettable by Ripley Hugo's love for it. They are hard-earned, clean-edged and as beautiful as new grass. --Deirdre McNamer, author of RED ROVER and MY RUSSIAN