Making Landfall by Paul Lindholdt (review)

Paul Lindholdt, longtime English professor at Eastern Washington University, has made a name for himself as a talented essayist through collections such as In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau (U of Iowa P, 2011), which received a Washington State Book Award, and Explorations in Ecocriticism: Advocacy, Bioregionalism, and Visual Design (Lexington, 2015). Another poem, written in the voice of a Puritan settler, "The Great Swamp Fight from the Pulpit Construed," ironically justifies King Phillip's War (1675–76), which decimated the Wampanoag tribe, as justification of the Puritan mission: "As pitiful as their cries / among the flames, scriptures declared them good. / We are the avenging sword of Leviticus today" (65 lines 29–31). On his back cover blurb, reviewer Michael Branch, another early Americanist in background, lauds the central imaginative, and possibly pedagogical, value of Making Landfall, as "these evocative poems bring both the nature and culture of the American colonies to life in ways no history book could."