The Reluctant Hunter

About the Book

THE RELUCTANT HUNTER won the Texas Writers Recognition Award for poetry, a grant of $2000 toward publication of this book, sponsored by the Texas Commission On Arts and presented by the Texas Institute Of Letters. The first edition was published by Latitudes Press in 1989.

THE RELUCTANT HUNTER is a collection of sixty poems, covering a span of twenty years. The setting is West Texas at its best and at its worst. There is a subtext of the hunter moving from an over-persuaded spouse to a devotee of the sport. In the beginning, she sat in a deer blind with a shotgun on her left and a rifle on her right, doing what she loved to do best in the world, dreaming with a pen in her hand and a notebook in her lap writing poetry. She was a city girl who loved concrete and indoor plumbing, but sometime during those twenty seasons she fell in love with the spreading oaks, the kalechi roads, the scrubby mesquite-covered hills, the rustic old cabin, and last but far from least, the simple pleasures of hunting with her husband on their deer lease in Brackettville.

About the Author

Joyce Pounds Hardy is a native Houstonian, a graduate of Rice University. Her first book, THE RELUCTANT HUNTER won the Texas Writers Recognition Award for poetry, a $2000 grant for publication of the work. Its first edition was published by Latitudes Press in 1989, followed by FRENCH WINDOWS, written with four friends in Paris and published by Eakin Press. Her only non-fiction work, SURVIVING AUNT RUTH, was published in 1995 by AuthorHouse. Her latest book published by Texas Review Press in 2007 is entitled ROADS TO FORGOTTEN TEXAS, a collaboration of Rice photographer, Tommy LaVergne, and Hardy, who composed a poem for each photograph. This Christmas she published MANY’S STORIES, a children’s book of original poems and stories that she had told her thirteen grandchildren when they were little. She has a manuscript of poetry at Texas Review Press, which will be published later this year.