With strength, honesty and her own brand of rough beauty, Judith Minty pours an intimate understanding of the earth, as well of what lies above and beneath it, into this artfully assembled volume linked with images of "the bear," both visual and linguistic.The poet confirms her role as a unique voice of the Midwest, speaking powerfully for all regions to hear.

In this collection, Minty adds 20 new poems to selections from three previous collections--Lake Songs and Other Fears, In the Presence of Mothers and Dancing the Fault--and from three chapbooks--12 Letters to My Daughters, Yellow Dog Journal and Counting the Lossses. The new and selected collection that emerges is a book to treasure, to read and re-read.

Minty is no mere "nature poet," nor is she a regionalist, although the lake country of Michigan inhabits, or haunts, many of the poems. She also writes of California with its mysterious gray whales, earthquakes, rainstorms and giant trees. No matter where she is, Minty is a poet of the ancient elements of earth, fire, water and air. As skillfully as she describes the attraction-replusion of nature, she also reveals the magnetism between mothers and daughters, friends and lovers, tugging the reader's own buried memories and bringing them to the surface.

Minty deserves the many awards she has won, and now she merits even more attention beyond the midwest from coast to coast.

Walking with the Bear is an extraordinary collection. I was especially drawn to the new poems which seem to lift Judith into the very front rank of American Poetry. Jim Harrison author of The Shape of the Journey and Legends of the Fall

I've known and believed in Judith Minty's poetry for almost thirty years now, and have taken her books to heart, one by one. Walking with the Bear includes a bountiful selection of her best past work, and extends the range of her storytelling power with new poems so effortlessly and succinctly written that I find myself inside their experiences as I read them, as I hear them. Walking with the Bear confirms Minty as one of the most important poets of her generation. William Heyen author of Diana, Charles and the Queen and Pterodactyl Rose Poems of Ecology

Judith Minty is a shaman in her work. She has a unique and quirky sensibility to which I find myself drawn again and again when I need to be reminded of the truths of my own strange kind, and reaffirmed in the veracity of the natural world. Whether in the dark woods, pursuing her bear, or in the less forboding and often tender labyrinth of the family, Minty's vision and language are precise and incisive. Her poems require us to abandon the world of our cherished comforts and opinions. They make our experience new again, the way we might rediscover the feel of our favorite touchstone when we remember to take off our gloves. Dan Gerber author of Trying to Catch the Horses and A Last Bridge Home

Judith Minty is a poet who sees. The passionate and precise regard everywhere manifest in this book casts a quiet radiance that in no way disguises the rock-hard wisdom beneath. Minty's poems-capacious, wide-ranging, truth-telling-are works of consummate balance, with one foot in the world of creatures and weathers, the other in the realm of the human heart. As this collection amply demonstrates, she does poetry's work. Jane Hirshfield author of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and The Lives of the Heart

One of my mentors, teachers, shamans is Judith Minty, who finds her sanity stalking wild bears along the Yellow Dog River in Hemingway country in Northern Michigan has released a compilation of strongest works from her major books titled Walking With the Bear. What a fine poet she is and what an important work this is--every library should have it, every feminist should read it, every man should devour it if he would be audacious enough to think he could understand women. This is a major work, folks, in the tradition of Harrison's Shape of the Journey. It's for late-night reading with Grand Marnier or slowly brewing loose jasmine tea. Minty's the real thing--a boss poet. Walking with the Bear is a fine mid-career retrospective that should be on the shelf of any aspiring poet, teacher, or serious reader.

I have read this material many times to try to make peace with it. The cramped writing style does not allow me to grasp the far-fetched imagery. Many of the poems serve as models for the types of writing which students and working poets should avoid.