Jim Barnes is an accomplished poet of the American landscape. Of Choctaw, Welsh, and English descent, he has published eight books of poems that explore land, loss, memory, and heritage. While he prefers not to be labeled a Native American poet, many of his best poems explore bones, rocks, rivers, plains, and glyphs that refer to Indian history.

Barnes was born on 22 December 1933 in Summerfield, Oklahoma, to the ranchers Bessie Vernon Adams Barnes and Austin Oscar Barnes. In a 1987 autobiographical essay, "On Native Ground," Barnes makes clear his spiritual debt to the hill country of eastern Oklahoma. He credits Le Flore County's Fourche Maline River and Holson Creek, and the woods and meadows that lay between them, with giving him the strong sense of place that characterizes his poetic imagination.

After graduating from high school in Oklahoma, Barnes moved to Eugene, Oregon, where he worked for nearly a...