The Devotion Field
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The experimental and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E influence is clear, yet The Devotion Field offers, in a number of urban elegies, more narrative and personal (though still political) detail than has been Keelan’s habit. Full of cultural and social critique, the poems concern themselves with the artifice of language, the art of being and the art of art, the fragmentation and continuous flux of contemporary life. She employs trademark techniques: stream-of--consciousness, free association and associative leaps, in addition to a new emphasis on melody and musical phrasing.
Antique
She brought the teapot because it was broken
& broken still valuable,
A thing not available to her otherwise.
On its restored surface a pastoral
Flickered once. Too late.
She was not honest but she was a poet
Mending the broken valuable . . .
“What absolute nonsense!” cried the Earthworm.“Nothing
Is ever all right in the end and well you know it.”
Poor Earthworm, Ladybug whispered,
Loving all that is disaster
Bellydown breathing with it everafter.
“Claudia Keelan’s The Devotion Field fully confirms the promise of her earlier books, especially the recent Utopic. The quotidian world of what seems to be things, ‘dog food and soil,’ ‘dust and bits of paper,’ flows naturally and luminously into the world of ideas, which becomes even more palpable. ‘Into the possibilities of the next page, / Or more nearly, another day.’ The transit, returning us to where we always are, is breathtaking.”—John Ashbery
Claudia Keelan is the author of three previous prize--winning collections of poetry. She teaches in the MFA and Ph.D. programs at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and is the editor of Interim.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Keelan, the author of four well-received collections, continues to ask critical questions about religious transcendence, social responsibility and what it means to be good in her newest book. "Looked inside An American soul," she writes in the opening poem, setting up one of the primary themes of the collection: the troubled and troubling intersection of the personal and the political. Keelan obsesses about the nature of the American both for the individual and the state: "Each actor involuntarily God / Thou Not Thou Thou // & all such poor representatives of the nation." Her ruminations are deeply rooted in the literary tradition; allusions to canonical American writers such as Hawthorne and Thoreau recur. The poems register continual astonishment at the mere fact of being alive; many poems marvel at the existence of the poet's son. The heady transcendental quality of Keelan's subject matter risks both pretension and preciousness, but the flat, direct tone of her verse acts as a regulator. Ultimately, a genuine and not-at-all trite sense of gratitude for the miracles of daily life provides responses, if not answers, to Keelan's questions, but many post-elections readers will find her inquiries into the larger patterns and parameters of the national soul more pressing.
