“I spent one whole amazing fall morning engrossed in this book. What impresses me most is the love and music and startling intelligence with which, for all of us, Walt McDonald charts the territory beyond mid-life.” —Jeanne Murray Walker “For years, I’ve wondered in amazement how Walt McDonald does what he does, poem after poem, book after book. He sings like no one else. In Climbing the Divide, McDonald has made his strongest collection of poems yet.” —David Citino, author of The News and Other Poems “Climbing the Divide must have been written with a pen Walt McDonald dipped into his heart. Crisscrossing generations, poems detail watching a grandfather with knuckles the size of walnuts carve a grizzly bear out of oak, taking car keys away from a father who drove tanks for Patton and thinking about nights in the jungle of Vietnam while pushing a granddaughter in a swing because her father is training overseas for Desert Storm. Binding us to his Texas world in sensual detail about men with big-boned fists who inhabit a land where the moon pockmarks the sky, Walt McDonald refuses to let moments of communion be swallowed by war on every channel. His poems stay lodged in the heart to remind us why we need to celebrate, even in a world that threatens to drown out song.” —Vivian Shipley, author of When There Is No Shore (winner of the 2002 Word Press Poetry Prize) “Like no one else, McDonald can stay in the moment—can BE—and then write with crisp clarity from such intense BEing. Here, this allows him to approach aging with intelligence and wit.” —North American Review “[P]robably his most impressive, book. ...[T]he poems in Climbing the Divide are immensely moving. In this book, McDonald, the former poet laureate of Texas, has once again shown the continuing effects of the Vietnam War on an aware consciousness and that a great writer never stops producing memorable works." —The VVA Veteran "Walt McDonald's 19th collection, Climbing the Divide, is full of narrative meditations on family and place rendered in direct, compressed language and braced by details drawn from a rancher's life." —North Dakota Quarterly "Like feathers, [McDonald’s] poems have both lightness and strength; he understands the poetic virtue of understatement and the human virtue of humility. These are not experimental poems; they are deeply, originally traditional, and just as deeply accomplished."—ForeWord