Learn to Love the Haze

Learn to Love the Haze

By Robert Roripaugh

Robert Roripaugh was appointed by Governor Jim Geringer as Poet Laureate of Wyomingin 1995, capping Roripaugh’s distinguished career as a poet and educator. Today, his stature among outstanding Western poets is unchallenged. High Plains Press is pleased to issue a reprint-edition of Learn to Love the Haze.

• • 0-931271-35-5 • trade paper • 64 pp • $9.95 ORDER NOW

Learn to Love the Haze

By Robert Roripaugh

“Wyoming poems dominate the book…rooted in Roripaugh’s sensitivity to the land, the weather, the wildlife and the people of the state ….Learn to Love the Haze is an impressive…book of poetry.”
•• Peggy Simson Curry

“Haze is a Western book, full of sage and chamisa, and both the living West and the West of long ago—of Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone—are present.… I would recommend this book to anyone familiar with Western life.…”
•• Don Snow, The Salt Cedar

Robert Roripaugh

A writer of fiction as well as poetry,  Robert Roripaugh was appointed by Governor Jim Geringer as Wyoming's Poet Laureate from 1995 through 2002.

He spent his early years on a ranch along the Wind River Mountains near Lander and completed B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Wyoming in the 1950s. After Army service in Japan and further graduate work, he returned to Laramie where he taught creative writing and western American literature for 35 years.

Roripaugh's latest book, The Legend of Billy Jenks, (High Plains Press, 2007) collects for the first time short stories he has written over the past 55 years, with new notes on each story and a foreword by John Nesbitt, western novelist and English instructor at Western Wyoming College.

Roripaugh’s poetry is collected in Learn to Love the Haze (Spirit Mound Press, 1976, and High Plains Press, 1996) and The Ranch (2001), a finalist for a Western Writers of America Spur Award for 2002. A novel set in postwar Japan, A Fever for Living (Morrow, 1961), was published in hardcover and paperback editions in both America and England. Honor Thy Father (Morrow, 1963), a historical novel dealing with a family ranching in Wyoming's Sweetwater River country in the late 1800s, won a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Museum and Western Heritage Center and was recently reprinted in a paperback edition by HarperCollins.

Over Roripaugh’s career, his poems and stories and stories have appeared widely in magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Atlantic Monthly, Quarterly West, and South Dakota Review.