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Mountain Music features poems by John Ridland, with engravings by Jeff Abshear. Ridland was the author of many books of poetry including Ode on Violence (1969), In the Shadowless Light (1978), Elegy for My Aunt (1984), Palms (1993), Life with Unkie (1999), A Brahms Card Ballad (2007), and Happy in an Ordinary Thing (2013). His poems appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic, The Hudson Review, and The Hungarian Quarterly. He edited The Little Square Review 1966-1972.

Ridland was celebrated for his award-wimming translation of the epic poem John the Valiant (1999) by the Hungarian poet Sandor Petöfi, as well as Sándor Márai’s The Withering World (2013), and Miklos Rádnoti’s All That Still Matters at All (2014). Ridland also translated the Middle English epic poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Two parts of this appeared in the Hudson Review; the full poem was published in 2013 by Taller Martín Pescador in Michoacán, Mexico. In 2014 Askew Publications issued his epic poem, A. Lincolniad.

About his work the author David Slavitt wrote:

“John Ridland’s thoughtful and accomplished poems first win our admiration, then our assent and, finally, our gratitude for their vivid, gentle, and yet unflinching vision of what our lives are like. In other words, he begins in elegance and ends in wisdom.”

Mountain Music was printed at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center by Jeff Abshear from hand-set Bembo type using a Vandercook Universal III proof press on Rives Heavyweight paper. The cover pages were made by hand from cotton and abaca fibers at the KBAC.  The dark blue endpapers were created with the assistance of Tom Balbo at the Morgan Paper Conservatory. Seventy-five copies of this book were printed.