Girl on a Pony

Hanners, emeritus English professor at the University of Arkansas, here provides a moving, eloquent memoir of frontier life between the two world wars. In 1925 when she was four, her family moved from a dug-out shack in Colorado to the Valley of the Dry Cimarron, the arid, inhospitable area shared by New Mexico, Oklahoma and Colorado. There she and her younger siblings were raised in a ``separate and distinct civilization with its own codes and manners.'' Life was hard even when times were good, as they were in the '20s, and far more difficult after the effects of the Depression were compounded by the drought of the early '30s and the dust storms that followed. Laced with the author's poems and a spirit of dry humor, including cowboy tall tales and practical jokes, Hanners's recollections convey the warm humanity that sustained her family and neighbors through the hardships of that place and time. Photos. (Apr . )