Old and Lost Rivers is a vivid and mov¬ing collection of poems about people who have been beaten down by bad weather, poor crops, and little love save what their memories have put away. John Van Doren has called the book “a report of a vanishing world that was always achingly inarticulate and therefore of violent heart.” Many of the poems are harsh, even cruel, yet there is release of one kind or another, through fantasy or revenge; often it comes in a tired accep¬tance of what is.J. T. Ledbetter’s poems have been widely published; his previous collection is Underlying Premises. He is professor emeritus at California Lutheran Univer¬sity in Thousand Oaks, California.