Red Crane Books
725 Camino Lejo
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505

Editorial/Marketing & Sales Inquiries
505 476-1155 (phone)
505 476-1156 (fax)

Order Phones
800 249-7737
505 277-4810

Order Fax
800 622-8667
505-986-1325 FAX
anna.gallegos@state.nm.us

This Dancing Ground of Sky The Selected Poetry of Peggy Pond Church by Peggy Pond Church introduction by Shelley Armitage 216 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 $12.95 paper, 1-878610-28-7 Presenting a lifetime of insights and observations so true and sharp the only response is, YES.

I do not dream of love anymore, only sometimes of death in deep waters. What will it seem like, I wonder, not to waken? The world will go on, I know--- summer and winter, morning and evening, birds coming back in spring, the rivers carving valleys and filling them up again, seas rising and falling. But what when the eye does not wake to see or the heart to sing it? Excerpt from "Alas"

Peggy Pond Church, acclaimed New Mexico poet, is a masterful voice with volumes to speak. Possessing a capacity for looking with clear eyes at unpleasant realities as well as beauty, she wrote every day of her life. She wrote with a woman's sensitivity, although she is not a "woman's poet." Nor is she a regional poet. She, like Frost, wrote of a region and about the world. Like Jeffers, she wrote of an incident and about humanity. She, like Blake, interpreted the mundane with mysticism. Peggy Pond Church, a robust, independent and private woman with an intense love for the land, was born in 1903 in the Territory of New Mexico and died in 1986 in Santa Fe. In her early life, Church lived on the Pajarito Plateau on which Los Alamos was built. She spent two years at Smith College before returning to New Mexico in 1924 to life at the Los Alamos Ranch School, where her husband taught. She was a mother of three boys, living in the remote mountain setting until 1942 when the federal government appropriated the school and the surrounding plateau for their secret "Manhattan Project." After her years in Los Alamos, Church and her family lived in Taos, New Mexico, until 1957, then in Berkeley, California, for three years before returning to Santa Fe for the remainder of her life. Order Form | Home | Poetry Page