The Lesser Fields
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- ¥1,700
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- ¥1,700
発行者による作品情報
Winner of the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schlegel's debut, winner of the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry, presents a stark, haunted landscape, as expansive as it is lonesome and yet quietly inviting. It's a world where the mind projects its solitude onto nature while nature returns the favor. "Here and not here," says Schlegel, "I breath away/ the parts of myself I no longer require." A lost lover knits with the natural world after death ("Tonight, her name is a leaf covering/ my left eye. The right I close/ for the wind to stitch shut with thread/ from the dress she wore into the grave/ where the determined roots of the tree/ are making a braid around her body"); elsewhere another lover is able to "fill the bath with everything that has/ Or could ever happen between us," imbuing everyday domestic tasks like bathing with symbolic portent in language both straightforward and seductive. A series of haiku-like "November Deaths" ekes out little truths ("But for the tip of land/ At which the vessel is aimed/ There is nothing to steady its course") and another series of "Lives" asks, in various ways, "Toward what am I drawn?" Answers are everywhere in this promising first book.