Book excerpt: Art Goodtimes is legendary along the Southern Rockies as poet, performer, ritualist, Rainbow Tribe, and Green Party activist. In her introduction, "deep ecologist" Dolores LaChapelle describes him as part of the bardic tradition "which shows us how nature and human consciousness are but different aspects of one consciousness. Bards put mind and body together within the whole of nature." In As if the World Really Mattered, we find poems that joyfully expound on the natural world and our relationship to it. Lyrical but root essential, Goodtimes speaks as one of the ancient storytellers--wise and sly. These poems could have been sung underground in the caves of Lascaux or atop a rock in a sacred grove. Political at heart, Goodtimes opposes the alienation of industrial culture from our interdependent life on earth. Much of his work has only been published in chapbooks, broadsides, "bundles," and various ephemera. This is his first major collection. "Poet Tree, as my friend Kush would say, with all its rich history/herstory, springs from storytelling. It is an art that allows us humans to speak, not just for ourselves but for the world around us in all its illusive facets--poor matchstick, poppycock, immortal diamond. For me, poetry's simplicity is its charm. No techno gimmicks, celluloid tricks. No dazzling mechanical arrays. Just voice--expressed as language, that tantalizingly accessible chameleon whose shape runs the gamut from the mundane to the divine, from the idiotic to the elegant."--from the author's Preface