The Road to Lilac Hill explores the arc of life, individual and universal. Topics range from childhood memories of World War II coastal blimps, to elusive grandchildren hiding in summer grass, from mysteries of photography and seeing, to the grandeur of Oregon's varied landscape. Drake's poems tease out the question of time: Where does it go, what does it mean, and what do we make of it? Her work is playful but serious, accessible but layered with meaning to be examined and enjoyed. I love Barbara Drake's warmhearted and intimate and modest voice in these poems. I love, especially, the way she evokes the nostalgic past without sentimentality but with great good humor and wonder; and how she looks at the natural world, even the tiniest blooms underfoot, with such close attention and curiosity and appreciation. In these poems it's as if we are sitting across the kitchen table from a dear friend, a friend who is funny and kind, who can always find the magic in the commonplace. -- Molly Gloss , author of The Hearts of Horses Barbara Drake is one of a kind, an original. She writes about the plainest, the most ordinary things in poems made with such a light touch they almost float off the page. they are delightful, in the highest sense of that word. Fetching. Sheep, wildflowers, granddaughters and border collies inhabit them, and a kestrel on the telephone wire / . . . enjoying her morning mouse, / whose limp tail dangles like an untied shoestring. effervescent poems. Deft. Luminous. Down-home. -- Clemens Starck , author of Cathedrals & Parking Lots: Collected Poems It is a gift to travel The Road to Lilac Hill with Barbara Drake. The seventy-five- year-old woman has seen wonders in her life, she tells us. You rarely see such things anymore. yet with every page she continues to see, and in these poems we walk beside her as she shares her view from a perspective of insight and good humor. Lilac Hill Road, she says, rises and falls in hills and hollows, / yet gives me a steady place in the universe, and this collection gives us a steady place from which we view dogs and sheep and rivers, the wildflower stories her beloved farm tells over and over, a double helix of pelicans in high desert air, a world she has ridden to its end / and its beginning. -- Bette Husted , author of All Coyote's Children Barbara Robertson Drake was born in Kansas in 1939 and moved west via old Route 66 in 1941, riding between her parents on a small wooden box (for the view) on the seat of their new Chevrolet pickup, all their belongings in the back. The family eventually landed in Coos Bay, Oregon, where Drake grew up and graduated from Marshfield High School. She later attended the University of Oregon, receiving her BA in English in 1961. After spending a year exploring Europe by motor scooter with her husband, Albert Drake, and another year living in a stone cabin in the woods outside Portland and giving birth to their son, Moss, she returned to the University of Oregon as a TA and graduate student. Her daughter Monica was born during a spring finals week. Drake received her MFA in creative writing in 1966 and subsequently lived in Michigan for sixteen years, where her daughter Bellen was born. She taught at Michigan State University for several years before returning to Oregon to teach creative writing and literature at Linfield College from 1983 to 2007. She also served as a visiting writer at Whitman College in Walla Walla and at Lewis and Clark College in Portland. Now a Linfield College English Professor Emerita, she lives with her second husband, William Beckman, on a small Yamhill County farm in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range, where they enjoy walks with their two border collies and introducing their grandchildren to country life.