Michael Shoemaker

Poetry Book: Rocky Mountain Reflections

Publisher: Poet’s Choice

Publication Date: September 2023

Cost: $25.00

Purchase: Poet’s Choice, Amazon

Book Description: Michael Shoemaker’s first collection of poetry is a celebration of poetry, photography, articles and short stories of the Rocky Mountain West. With joy, humor and beauty he sends you on your own unique journey to discover nature, relationships with others and God. With publications in over 40 journals, magazines and newspapers we hope you will enjoy what others have found that is interesting and uplifting in his style of poetry and photography panorama.

What Others Are Saying About the Book:
“If you like your prose, poetry and photographs to concern themselves with the spiritual, the human, and the environmental, then Michael Shoemaker’s first collection Rocky Mountain Reflections will be just the book for you. The poems and the prose show the author’s genuine love and compassion for other people and a timely awareness of the environmental issues affecting the planet as we move ever closer to the eleventh hour. For the most part the photographs show exactly what we will be losing if we don’t deal with our hubris and start to think in the long term instead of closing our eyes to our short-term obsession with profit and perpetual growth. It is a book that both touches the heart and engages the intellect. It is a collection that will be a welcome addition to anyone’s bookshelf – buy it.”

– Mervyn Linford, poet, author, editor of Littoral Magazine and publisher of Littoral Press

Sample Poem

High Uinta Mountains

This morning
you and I hopped
from rock to rock
and lake to lake
just like we did as kids.

From Lake Dean and Jean
and Dale and Dane
along the Highland Trail,
only getting lost one more
time than we did as boys
catching more fish
(or so we tell ourselves).

Tired, saturated in thin air and sunlight,
we once again play like listless lizards
laying side by side on the warmest side of a slab of granite
crowned with those afternoon boiling billowing white clouds,
knowing somehow without speaking
that years are less than hours
Our exhale links to one-single-moment,
watching a winding butterfly reach and land
on one of the tallest points of the pine treetops.