Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this in exchange for my honest review.

This poetry book reads like a love letter to the wild and scary parts of humans that are still connected with the land. The beating, thumping, heart pounding part of us that wants to scurry through the underbrush or fly through the trees. Human beings have become disconnected from that animal parts of ourselves. Mike Bond, among many things, is a tireless environmentalist and for one beautiful hour, as your pour yourself over the pages, you can let the wild drums out and feel a connection.

It isn't a perfect book, the poetry was flat at points and the preface was a little jarring. I understand that Bond has earned his political and environmental stripes but I don't need that in the forefront of my mind while trying to absorb poetry. Also, I know some readers are going to point out that there are Native American Iconography in a few of these poems. Bond, to my understanding, is not native and some people would point out that this is cultural appropriation. I am not sure. The poems come off to me as an homage to a Native culture, a culture that treats the environment with reference, rather than a way to score some poem points. That is a subjective point for the reader an maybe something to be sensitive to.

I think that this is a worthy attempt at writing down a human feeling that almost seems unwritable. That throbbing connection to the land that humans seem to be getting further away from. Read it, see how you feel. I know it sparked a slow and steady boom --- boom inside me, if only for a moment.

There's some very good poetry in this book, along with some that I didn't quite understand. Overall a decent read though.

I enjoyed this book of poetry. I especially liked the preface about what poetry is and can mean. I liked best the poems about love and death and the meaning of life. I will be going back to reread the lines that struck me.

Poetry collections are like molded jello salads on a holiday buffet table. Some go straight for them, others avoid them on principle, and most of us take a bit, sample and perhaps savor the tasty bits within.

Mike Bond and his work are new to me, and I was excited for the opportunity to engage with these poems (thanks, NetGalley and Big City Press!).

I started with the preface and wonder why it was included. It starts with cave men “chewing mammoth bones” and devolves from there into some ranting (against poetry in academia) and scolding (“we sh'ould all write poetry.”). Mmm okay. Moving on.

On to the poems: there’s a huge variety here. Some in rhyme, many free verse. Some are several pages long, others very short (“Nothing” is 5 words!). I admire Bond’s ambition in trying out so many forms.

Some of these poems really trouble me. “Old Fool” is about a very elderly man and his age related afflictions, and “so we suffer him.” There’s no love or appreciation for the person in the aged body, just the realization that “we each will soon enough be like him.” Another poem, “Every Good,” states that “every good intention hides a spine of poison.” I realize as I write this that I look for humanism in poetry and am not finding it here. Bond seems to find meaning and beauty in nature (often from the point of view of a Native American gaze) and not in people.

I suspect there are many readers who are looking for other things in their poems, and who will appreciate this more than I did.

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

My first word of advice when picking up this book? Do not skip the Preface. The author has absolutely delightful insight into the nature of poetry and I honestly laughed when I read the word literati (side note: I know it’s a real word but I cannot help but associate it with illuminati).

The poetry itself instilled a soft delight in me as I read. It is filled with rich imagery and longing. I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed this collection, as poetry collections I’ve gotten from Netgalley have been rather hit or miss with me.

I would definitely recommend picking this book up.

Bravo Mike Bond!
I really enjoyed sitting one afternoon and reading this twice.
Two of my favourites were “What better Way” and “ Paradise ducks “
I loved the beginning of the book, this gave me an insight of what kind of poetry I may have been about to read, though it wasn’t “about” the author which was nice. It was really nice however to hear a little about Mike Bond at the end and put the whole book together 5 star for that alone!
The depth of some of his poetry was fantastically dictionary searching (I had to use a dictionary to put some parts together) Wonderful! Make me work to love the word !

I may have had high expectations from this collection, but it was a little lost in the quiet wild.
Seeing City Light Books opened my eyes and I quickly jumped in, the cover shows the grazing buffalo and I thought somewhere in this collection I’d hear the drum beat. A few poems listed I enjoyed
-Hungry Magpie
-Evening March
-The Mind Sees Itself
-Jicarilla

I enjoyed this book of poetry and the writer’s perspective on nature, life, death, and love. The prose is simple but evocative. I found the nature imagery particularly beautiful and enjoyed how the wild, natural world was used to reflect broader life. The overwhelming feeling I got from this collection was a yearning for a quieter, simpler time, being one with nature. Aside from the poems, I was very drawn in by the introduction to this collection and the author’s discussion of poetry. I’m not sure how well it fit with the tone of the poetry and therefore it felt like a strange choice of introduction, but I found it fascinating as a stand-alone essay. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

I love poetry, but I won't read anything that I don't enjoy. In this collection of poems I found myself reading over and over certain poems and completely ignoring others. My favourites were Evening, March and Buffalo Caller. I will definitely re-read this book.

There are some very profound poems that are really touching and thought-provoking. The author paints great scenes of places such as mountains and plains. There are themes of love and loss and forgetting the past. I truly enjoyed a perspective about parts of history that may be forgotten in poetic form. Reading this book felt like flashbacks from the past to the present, like a glimpse into someone's inherited memories. It was very enjoyable to read.

Thank you Netgalley and Big City Press for sending me the anthology for review.
As a literature teacher, I am always looking for news pieces to use within the classroom. Too show diversity and comparison, especially when the content deals with every day issues such as race, environmental issues and other social issues.
This anthology has a little bit of everything, some pieces I could definitely relate to as a human being and others I could see as valuable teaching tools. When I say a teaching tool I do mean the obvious ‘how to write a poem’ but also as a means to open a dialogue about social issues and get the students thinking and reacting. I few I noted and will go back to for further study were ‘Homecoming’ , ‘All this Time’, Manhattan Elegy’, and ‘Escape’ ( which I think I will use in unison with a ‘The Rain Horse’). Another piece that I will definitely include in my Protest Poetry section will be ‘Painted Hills’ which shows a rare glimpse into the Native American issues we don’t often see addressed in global poetry.
Even though I only mentioned a few above there are plenty more worth reading in this lovely collection of work. The themes are varied and the Bond uses a variety of styles to get his messages across.
Overall I would give this anthology a solid 4.5.

I haven't read a book of poems for a while and have never heard of Mike Bond, so thank you to the publisher and netgalley for a copy of this book which rectifies both these issues! Having looked the author up on Google I must admit I was expecting more from his poems, and was also irritated by the preface and his diatribe about other poets - readers should be able to make their own minds up as to what is good or bad. I'm not sure whether it was because I was reading on an e-reader, and maybe the punctuation was wrong, but the first sentence of the preface made little sense to me. "ancient as the human heart, poetry is."
The poems themselves were varied and many may be more relevant to US citizens with their references to golden gate bridge, prairies, buffaloes and native American peoples and beliefs.
Maybe for this reason I preferred the love poems and the short pithy verses such as "Stay". I do plan to return the book though and hopefully come to love some of the ones I rejected initially!

Main topics: nature, spirits, life, death, love, American West.

This book is amazing. The descriptions of nature are breathtaking.
It felt like being in the locations, and seeing the trees, the rivers.
The thoughts about life, death (and what lies between them) are so well constructed.
The poems about the tribes, their death and their suffering were very real.

Definitely rereading this book again soon.

“How we find meaning in the incomprehensible, beautiful, tragic and sacred mystery of life.”

I don’t know how to feel about that. I don’t know how to write this review.
This is my impression: I managed to take all the emotions with my heart, without my intellect fully understanding them. Maybe it's better if I explain myself. I loved the images that the poems put in my mind, I liked the sound of phrases and words, rhymes and musicality, but I found myself often not understand how a certain poem entered the general discourse of the book.

“What poetry tells is a story that puts us right in it. In the center of it, the survival point.”

Some images of the wild nature and the relationship of humanity with nature are beautiful, evocative, powerful and enthralling. Poems with “love theme” are less exciting. I'm sorry. The introduction is very interesting, it explains how the mind of the poet moves, what makes him write. I always thought that poetry should be a musical discourse, and certainly the author of this book is very good at creating evocative sounds. Unfortunately I found some poems untied from the discourse on nature, which was the main topic I wanted.

“These are the wine days
of October
when trees, threshed
of leaves, bow down
in prayer to winter,
when the sun, anguished
like an old hound,
leaves its bed
late, going early,
when the sap of life
is dried and frozen.”

I won't claim to be a real poetry buff but I was attracted to this volume for its themes of the natural world and our connections to it. I found some works were breathtaking in their clarity, some required contemplation ( is that not the purpose?) and a rare few completely abstract; to me, anyway. I could closely relate to "The Old Fool", empathise with the personal feelings of "Sorrow", "Nothing" and "Pain". The conjured images of the long-gone Great American West I found particularly enthralling.
I think really that it's earthy sentimentality really appeals.

I received a digital ARC copy of this book via NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I choose this book because I loved the cover, then there was the Preface- Rooted in the heart and I enjoyed the way he talks about Poetry and the origins of it.
“We should all write and read poems; they better our lives” and I agree with this with all my heart.

And then the Poems started, and I was disappointed, I expected something more, some of the poem I couldn’t connect with or understand, some of them were fine, and I loved and Enjoyed a good number of the rest.

I can’t give it three stars because it does worth more than that but it’s not four stars either.
I think I will add this book to my collection.

I was disappointed in this collection, not because of the quality of the poetry, but because Bond alludes to so much Indigenous content through the title, cover and imagery within the poems, while seeming to have no direct ties to the culture or heritage himself. That speaks to me of appropriation and misrepresentation.

I didn't find the poetry as firmly "nature" themed as the book details imply. There is a lot of other subject matter, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, shopping, and glasses of wine.

I particularly enjoyed the poems "Absaroka"and "Escalante Canyon".

I was drawn to this poetry collection because the blurb points out that Mike Bond was first published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for whom I have tremendous admiration. As the beautiful cover already suggests, many of the poems deal with mankind's connection to the natural world, but also with the connection to their own inner worlds. I found many poems so-so, but two things really confused me:

- Bond draws heavily on Native American themes and imagery: The "Great Spirit" is mentioned four times, there are drums and buffalos, and there is even one poem that says "Name us all,/ hundreds of tribes/ thousands of clans;/ many millions of lives." So I googled away, and while Mike Bond's CV is flaunted on different websites and has all kinds of info ("Active in political efforts to control the U.S. national debt and related problems" - ?), I found no trace of him being Native. So as he apparently isn't (please correct me if I'm wrong here!), I'd like to argue that WASPs should work on their own poetry and not appropriate Native American culture.

- The book has a preface in which Bond rants about "the poetry profesionals, umbilically tied to welfare stpiends from politically correct universities and mindless foundations" - you can of course throw around such dismissive and arrogant statements, but you have to be able to back them up, and Bond's oeuvre does not stand a chance against the likes of Robin Robertson and Danez Smith. Poetry needs to be easy to decode, Bond argues, and poetry has never had it so good because of the great rock bands who sing it. I find it funny to bring up such a (questionable) argument and then to omit poets like Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z - if there is poetry in contemporary music, you have to celebrate rap first and foremost.

More importantly, though: You don't tell me what poetry has to be, Bond! I want my poetry to be all kinds of things, unrestricted by rules, I want accessible and emotional poetry, I want complicated, puzzling poetry, I want political poetry, spiritual poetry, sung and spoken poetry, I want rap, I want poetry for the masses and for the niches, I want poetry in universities and in factories, I want it all, Bond, all of it!!

A book of poetry, some free verse, some formal, that evokes the American West, its openness, wildness, and its sense of desolation. Contemplating the universe and man’s place in it, along with the continuing destruction of the natural world, I found this an enormously satisfying experience. Recommended.

This was an ARC in exchange for an honest review with thanks to Netgalley and Big City Press. After finishing this book, I actually put in a preorder for a physical copy as I downright adored it.

The Drum Beats Within Us like most poetry collections has a few themes and layers running throughout, However, none are so impressive when Bond turns his attention to nature and the results are hard-hitting to say the least; the imagery is vibrant, devastating, and haunting.

A thoroughly modern 21 century collection that revisits and revises classic themes.

Highly recommended.