The River: Books One and Two by Lewis MacAdams [Book review]

[para. 1]: ""It is very beautiful to feel the rhythms that hold a man together," notes poet Michael McClure on a small book of poems by Lewis MacAdams called News from Niman Farm. The poet, activist and journalist who authored that book played a prominent role in New York city's avant-garde poetry scenes of the late 1960s and early '70s. Later, moving west, he settled in the Northern California village of Bolinas, where poets such as Robert Creeley, Donald Allen and Joanne Kyger retreated to participate in an experimental community isolated between a marshy lagoon and the rugged coast of the Pacific Ocean. MacAdams' first book in many years, The River, continues an exploration of the rhythms noted by McClure. This new book, however, shifts focus from the Bolinas Mesa of Northern California to that desert metropolis of Los Angeles where MacAdams has lived in recent years, active in the struggle over that city's water resources."