Probably I would
come back to gallant Phil LeNoir's "Finger of Billy the Kid,"
written while he was dying of tuberculosis in New Mexico. I
wouldn't leave without the swift, brilliantly economical
stanzas that open the
ballad of "Sam Bass," and a single line, "He came of a
solitary race," in the ballad of "Jesse James."
Several other poets have, of course, achieved something for
mortals to enjoy and be lifted by. Their work has been sifted
into various anthologies. The best one is_ Signature of the
Sun: Southwest Verse, 1900-1950_, selected and edited by Mabel
Major and T. M. Pearce, University of New Mexico Press,
Albuquerque, 1950. Two other anthologies are _Songs of the
Cattle Trail and Cow Camp_, by John A. Lomax, 1919, reprinted
in 1950 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York; _The Road to
Texas_, by Whitney Montgomery, Kaleidograph, Dallas, 1940.
Montgomery's Kaleidograph Press has published many volumes by
southwestern poets. Somebody who has read them all and has
read all the poets represented, without enough of
distillation, in _Signature of the Sun_ could no doubt be
juster on the subject than I am.
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