The book you hold in your hands is, literally, the result of a dream wakened from on July 20, 2013. In it, Walter Pavlich and his wife, poet Sandra McPherson, visited me near dawn to discuss the unavailability of his previously published books of poetry. Walter and I had been friends years before in Missoula, though we had little contact between 1984, by which time we both had moved away from Montana, and the time of his death in 2002, at the age of 47. I had never before met Sandra McPherson, nor had we ever corresponded. As odd as the dream may seem, Walter had been much on my mind during the previous year as I edited Tom Aslin's memoir about their friendship, "Lessons of Time, Velocity, and Hard Music," which was later published on the website of the magazine I help edit, basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts.In that dream, I agreed to do whatever I could to make Walter's collected poems a reality.
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From the introduction by David Axelrod