From the back cover:
F. W. Bateson: "I'm pleased to learn that the barbaric yawp is still alive and well in the land of the free and the home of the brave." David Daiches: "I am impressed by your combination of quietly personal description of natural scenes and objects with a powerful mythopoeic imagination.... Clearly there is an impressive original talent at work here." Gary Snyder: "...here are the goddesses of tree and lion: Diana naked bathing. Mountains, rifles, and the Grail-quest-the ancient hawk-like myth energy of man ... tremendous energy." Paul Denison (Monterey Peninsula Herald): "...the work of a man who has found his own landscape and his own voice ... sensuously evocative of long past and far distant time, as well as of place, of human as well as unhuman resonances...." Paul Craig (Sacramento Bee): "Bill Hotchkiss ... can do on paper what photographer Ansel Adams does for nature with a camera ... a cheering tribute to the natural world which whether we admit it or not, is a part of us." James B. Hall in New Letters: "Of the emerging professionals, Hotchkiss (Climb to The High Country) is the most unusual and he is apparently the most broadly educated (four literary degrees); is the most committed to a region (Sierra Nevada Mountains); committed to a view of poetry, and also to a strong, public view of his own poetic masters.... His unit of composition is not so much the poem as it is the whole book...." Cornel Lengyel: "...a remarkable achievement ... rich and provocative ... suggests the gradual unveiling of an original and authentic American bardic voice ... the sounding forth of a new Whitman-Jeffers of the West." George Keithley: "...a remarkable collection of long poems; I don't know anyone else who could do this kind of work, this well. There are many strengths in the book.... I'd like to second what Hans Ostrom says ... about a 'sustained vision—a stamina—.' ...Many people just don't know how rare that is. And how important it is." Hans Ostrom: "What do we find in these long poems? Rage. They dramatize an agonized vision ... as if the mortally wounded wilderness itself were speaking." Art Petersen: "Hotchiss's poems suggest the visionary tradition of Dante, Milton, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot. Revealed here are long-abiding forms of real and surreal existences in human experience—from the seers of Demodocus and Oleli Coyote to satyrs and nymphs surviving to this age and from lightless Hades through portals of time into the rugged, prehistoric plateaus of the yet-remaining wilderness of the Sierras." James Freeman: "I marvel at the range ... so many narrators not of the same cloth, so many personas—animal, man, and otherwise. Your longer poems bridge the best of both narrative ... and lyric approaches." Shelby Stephenson (The Pilot): "America is Bill Hotchkiss' poem, particularly the American West of the High Sierras and the land and animals.... He calls louder than anybody since Emerson to make a truly original marriage with nature."