Why I Chose Cowboy Art for My Book Cover

I share the backstory of my new book's cover design—plus the title poem.

Dear Friends:

Firstly, forgive me. This here’s the third time I’ve intruded upon your inbox this month. I do not do so lightly. You are always free to unsubscribe, of course. However…

I have some great news to share:

Coming very soon.

This week I received the final cover design for my upcoming book of poems. And, honestly, it’s everything I hoped for.

The Backstory

Several springs ago, I was perusing an antique store in Spearfish, South Dakota, when I happened upon a print of the painting you see above.

That weekend I’d been roaming the Black Hills alone, reading Christian Wiman, and thinking very seriously about being a poet. (I repeat: I was reading Christian Wiman.)

I was also at the beginning of a western novel phase and had spent much of the five-hour drive from Sioux Falls listening to Larry McMurtry’s epic Lonesome Dove.

In South Dakota, Spearfish is about as west as it gets. I was hunting for vintage dime novels—Zane Grey, or something—but not cowboy art.

So. I studied the painting for several moments: the soft cascade of colors, the cigarette and the hat, the stance of the horse. The horse.

I snatched the painting from the wall and brought it to the checkout.

“Nice piece,” said a round man behind the counter.

“It’s great,” I agreed. “Do you know the artist?”

He paused, ran his finger along the black frame.

“Ah, that’s a Charlie Russell!”

It’s been hanging in my office ever since.

Turns out Charles Marion Russell (1864–1926) is considered one of the greatest painters of the American West. He created over 2,000 pieces. This painting, Just a Little Sunshine (ca. 1898), is one of his earlier impressionistic works.

The word “forbearance” means patient self-control, restraint, tolerance. It’s a recurring theme of my book—bearing with others, with places, with ourselves. Being borne by others, by places, by God.

Forbearance is taking the heat so a friend can rest in the shade.

Forbearance

Wind—unlike the likely droughts
and stubbled summer lawn,

or the cicada’s tymbal cry;
unlike the absolute emptiness

of fields under snow at night
with their highways like blue stitches;

unlike the austere Cooper’s hawks
perched upon fence posts

and splintered billboards—wind
was the one thing she refused

to abide: how it lashes the prairie,
the porch swing, the sky, penetrating

the slightest cracks of her
worn house, her worn face.

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Actually, the woman in this poem lived and died in South Dakota. But I want to save her story for next time. For now, here’s what Bruce Beasley had to say about Forbearance, which will be available very soon:

“To savor the contingency of being” could be the mission statement of Cameron Brooks’s Forbearance, a gorgeously written evocation and meditation on life lived among the prairies, orchards, flooded farms, “gaunt silo[s]" of South Dakota's High Plains. Brooks loves words and their glorious mouthfeels as much as he loves the world itself: “the ooze of too-ripe apples/beneath boots,” “the cicada’s tymbal cry.” In what he calls, with Stevensian grandeur, “the verve/of fathomless particularities,/ becoming what they only could become,” Brooks savors, with bemused forbearance and stunned adoration, all the contingent and fleeing moments of “the runaway chore of your life.”