ccp 001
Ode to certain interstates and Other Poems
by Howard Robertson
192 pp.
isbn: 0-9723234-2-2
$12.95






"Ode to certain interstates," the thirteen-part title poem of this collection, was inspired by the year poet Howard W. Robertson worked as a long-haul truck driver in the American West and British Columbia. In between pauses at truck stops and rest areas, the author meditates on (among other matters) Kant, the Kalapuyans, Basho, and the "best buffet in the West." The eight additional poems in the book, such as "Ode to this small stick" and "The transcendental laughter of Eleanor," use a refined intelligence to probe the daily intersections of the sacred and banal.

"Howard Robertson's handsome, heavy poems have the rangy unstoppable rush of rivers and the hardened, unending flatness of the American highway."
—Christopher Frizzelle, The Stranger

"What makes Robertson interesting, finally, is this sort of honesty. He wrestles with problems he can't 'prove,' he admits his failings and shortcomings, he moves restlessly through literature and the world, and ultimately he locates himself among his loved ones and in his place, which is all the more interesting because it is our place too."
—The Oregonian

"Robertson perfects his unique line, flitting from sublime detail to detail like the bats he describes feeding over a summer Shakespeare performance. From there he moves to slavery, prehistory, divorce, bourgeois property love, ecology, Ovid, Lucretius, the Bhagavad-Gita, the death of parents, and the willful blindness of the vacationer...Robertson reaches a standard that sometimes seems to no longer exist in the current poetry culture of easy praise and low expectations, and is growing into a poet of consequence."
—Grant Cogswell, The Stranger

"It's all just gorgeous, an intoxicating blend of the lowest low with the highest highbrow."
—Novella Carpenter, MetroActive


Howard W. Robertson, a retired research librarian and former area studies director, lives at the edge of the woods in Eugene, Oregon. In 1993, he left his position at the University of Oregon to write poetry full-time, and in 1995-96 he worked as a long-haul truck driver in the eleven Western states and British Columbia. An earlier chapbook of Robertson's poems, to the fierce guard in the Assyrian Saloon, was published by Ahsahta Press in 1987, and his poetry is included in The Ahsahta Anthology: Poetry of the American West. Robertson's poems have appeared in Nest magazine, Nimrod, Fireweed, Literal Latte, and various other publications. In 2003, he was awarded the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry.