A Note from the Author:
Forty-some miles inland of Corpus Christi Bay, air on the farm is saturated with Gulf humidity. The feeling is tropical. The look is arid—brush country stippled with prickly pear and yucca, cenizo and agarita, huisache and mesquite. Agua Dulce Creek marks the farm’s southern border, and like all creeks in South Texas, it is a dry creek—no water except when it rains, and rain is intermittent at best. When I got grown, I used to joke that only stubborn folk such as my German forebears would have arrived in such a landscape and said, “Hmmm. Let’s have a farm here.”
“David Meischen conjures the hackberries and mesquite, the cotton harvests and ‘rainless earth’ of his rural Texas homeplace with meticulous reserve, clarity, and crisp music. A work of abiding love and questing memory, this new volume provides the stirring pleasures of a family album while nimbly skirting sentimentality and reflexive nostalgia in favor of well-earned insight, jubilant celebration (mornings aglow like ‘carnival glass’), and able compassion. The highest compliment that I can pay Meischen is that his German-American family chronicle brings to mind James Agee’s indelible and legendary ‘Knoxville: Summer of 1915.’ Caliche Road Poems is a vibrant contribution to the literature of Texas.”
~ Cyrus Cassells, Texas Poet Laureate, 2021,
author of Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?