Mirrormaker

The author of The Stuntman melds myths ancient and contemporary among the raspberries, wolves, and taconite mines of Minnesota’s Iron Range.

Songwriter and poet Brian Laidlaw follows up The Stuntman with another collection that fuses the stories of two fabled couples: the mythical Narcissus and Echo, and Bob Dylan and Echo Star Helstrom, subject of the song “Girl from the North Country.” But where The Stuntman focused on Narcissus, The Mirrormaker takes its primary inspiration from Echo, drawing on ecocritical readings of American history and interrogating the masculine logic of resource extraction.

In these poems, Laidlaw explores themes of history and celebrity, love and longing, myth and meaning, in a landscape both ravaged and redemptive. He pits romantic obsession against self-obsession—”The first time I saw the moon / I thought it was my idea” —and asks whether a meaningful distinction can ever be drawn between the two. These themes are explored further in a companion song suite, written by Laidlaw and recorded with a longtime collaborator from the Iron Range, that accompanies this book via download.

Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, The Mirrormaker is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust—in mining economies and in young love.

“Laidlaw is a futuristic country poet-singer in the other side of the century’s mirror, where consumption, celebritifying, and commodification rule as the earth rots from the inside out . . . living proof that the bard is still with us.” —Gillian Conoley