Ludlow is a novel in verse, meaning it has the speed, concision and accuracy of the best poetry, along with the expansiveness and character development of a novel. It tells the story of a handful of immigrants—Greek, Mexican, Scottish, Italian—in southern Colorado, climaxing in the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914, in which elements of the Colorado National Guard killed striking miners and family members.
Ludlow is a novel in verse, meaning it has the speed, concision and accuracy of the best poetry, along with the expansiveness and character development of a novel. It tells the story of a handful of immigrants—Greek, Mexican, Scottish, Italian—in southern Colorado, climaxing in the Ludlow Massacre of April 1914, in which elements of the Colorado National Guard killed striking miners and family members.
The novel follows two primary characters: the fictional Luisa Mole, orphaned in the opening chapter, who must choose between life among the miners and the middle-class family who adopt her; and the historical figure Louis Tikas, a Cretan immigrant who, in the course of the book, becomes a labor organizer and a Ludlow martyr. But several minor characters—Too Tall MacIntosh, Lefty Calabrini, George Reed and his family, and even John D. Rockefeller, Jr.—also play significant roles in the book, which never succumbs to simplistic political pieties, but is engaged with identity and being.
I have also deliberately planted a version of the author in the book, guiding the story in time, allowing us to look at events from the vantage point of the whole century, and to understand both the personal import of the story to me and the profound difficulty of ever knowing the truth about such events. In a sense, the characters are more “grounded” and real than the author, who tells the story as a way of holding onto his own identity in the West. It’s as if the historical fictions of Tolstoy or Cormac McCarthy met the radical skepticism of Jorge Luis Borges with a cinematic vividness. Indeed, my prose Afterword quotes Borges’ call for a renewal of storytelling in verse. The book ends long after the massacre, with America changed by more wars and upheaval, in a scene where the author comes to know Luisa Mole more fully and imaginatively.
Finally, Ludlow is about language and landscape—the many languages that have named Colorado and America—the geographical memory of the nation.
“We are almost hurtled through time and space in metered verse that packs in the accumulating events of what took place. . . . Mason the poet/traveler juxtaposes his world against what it meant, and means, to be part of a nearly overwhelming inherited cultural history. . . . “
B.H. Fairchild
"...Within a driving narrative that never loses momentum, Mason’s deftly drawn characters, both historical and fictional, take on the lineaments of Dorothea Lange’s photographs. With Ludlow, reminiscent in its political and dramatic power of Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, Mason confirms his reputation as one of America’s finest poets and a master of narrative.”
Brighde Mullins
“Part historical exploration, part fiction, Ludlow is both a compelling story and a sustained act of poetic imagination. . . . In his endnote Mason writes that ‘To me, the story is a remarkable and irreducible element of humanity.’ In Ludlow he has found a form to hold this story, and he has created a truly great American character, a heroine of epic proportions, in Luisa Mole, a girl summoned from a photo of a photo.”
Ron Charles
“Yes, it’s told in more than 600 eight-line stanzas of nonrhyming iambic pentameter, and if those poetic technicalities excite you, you’ll be dazzled by the feats Mason can perform within that structure. For the rest of us, though, what really matters is this beautiful, wrenching tale... Ludlow blends fact and fiction to recreate one of the most tragic events in American labor history..."
Ted Kooser
“…Ludlow is an engrossing and deeply touching story in which the author is ever present, humbly hoping to offer us something of lasting value. And it is a credit to Mason’s talent as a writer that the fact that Ludlow is told in verse doesn’t get in the way of the telling. In fact, the rhythmical lines and stanzas draw us ever forward, into and through the story in ways in which prose writing is not always capable.”
David Mason’s books of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and Arrivals. His verse novel, Ludlow, was published in 2007, and named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and it won the Colorado Book Award. Author of a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, Mason has also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. His poetry, prose and translations have appeared in such periodicals as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Irish Times, and The Southern Review. He has also written the libretti for composer Lori Laitman’s opera of The Scarlet Letter and her oratorio, Vedem. He recently won the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Creativity in Motion Prize for the development of a new libretto. A former Fulbright Fellow to Greece, he lives near the Garden of the Gods in Colorado with his wife, Anne Lennox.
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Overview
The novel follows two primary ...