The Mirrormaker

In <i>The Mirrormaker</i>, songwriter and poet Brian Laidlaw melds myths ancient and contemporary among the raspberries, wolves, and taconite mines of Minnesota’s Iron Range.<br><br> A companion volume to Laidlaw’s 2015 project, <i>The Stuntman</i>, this collection 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 <i>The Stuntman</i> focused on Narcissus, <i>The Mirrormaker</i> takes its primary inspiration from Echo, drawing on ecocritical readings of American history and interrogating the masculine logic of resource extraction.<br><br> 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. <br><br> Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, <i>The Mirrormaker</i> is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust—in mining economies and in young love.