Bruce Harvey Kiskaddon — Collected Poems

Bruce Kiskaddon moved between ranch work, Australian cattle stations, Army mule trains, downtown hotel lobbies, Los Angeles stockyards, and the public gatherings where working cowboys heard their own lives spoken back to them. He wrote about branding, bogged cattle, wet boots, camp cooks, balky horses, aging hands, and the judgment that keeps both riders and animals alive; the old West in these poems is less a gunfighter’s stage than a place of hard work, dry comedy, loss, and exact knowledge. From the 1930s onward his poems traveled through the Western Livestock Journal, Los Angeles Union Stockyards calendars, live recitation, and Katherine Field’s closely observed drawings, then returned to speech at the modern cowboy-poetry gatherings. This edition resets 147 distinct poems: all thirty-one poems in Rhymes of the Ranges (1924), all forty in Western Poems (1935), and seventy-six additional poems preserved in the project’s later archival witness. It follows the original sequences and stanza forms, joins narrow-page hanging wraps back into their poetic lines, and repairs damaged readings by collation rather than reproducing the scans as facsimiles.