Field Knowledge

Description

Poetry. FIELD KNOWLEDGE, Morri Creech's second collection, is a series of lyrical meditations on the limits and perils of knowledge, the beauty of experience and its inherent deceptions. Covering a breadth of subjects—from poems about his own family and the connections between local landscape and collective memory, to evocations of Giotto, Newton, and Primo Levi—Creech explores both the familiar world and its hidden mysteries. Many of the poems in this collection share with its predecessor an interest in theological subjects: here are dramatic monologues in the voices of Job and his wife, even an "Elegy for Angels." Other poems evoke both the mysteries and terrors of science, as when Oppenheimer first beholds "the radiant god, shatterer of worlds" in "In the Orchards of Science." Still others examine the cost of experience through a variety of historical and fictional characters, including Marvell's coy mistress, Simone Weil, and Rousseau. Ranging from the humorous to the elegiac, employing both free verse and structured formal stanzas, Creech's lush poems explore the sting of experience while luxuriating in "the honey of knowledge." Winner of the first Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

"There are austere poets whose very distance from the world and whose reticent style create a tension that brings the experience described and the poem enacted into a sharper, more heartbreaking focus. And there are luxuriant poets—poets like Keats and Whitman and Hopkins—for whom the world's bounty and the heart's bottomless mysteries spill over into lines that almost burst with excess. Morri Creech is a luxuriant, but a canny one …[H]e has made a book in which a reader can both lose and find himself. FIELD KNOWLEDGE is a rare achievement, and a lasting one."—J. D. McClatchy (from the foreword).

"Morri Creech uncovers for us the world as unspeakable enigma...Each thing he holds up to the eye is lit from inside with the fire of its own passing away and its own eternity...These poems transform by a deepest magic."—Li-Young Lee

"Gorgeous as they are, these poems maintain a fine tension between earthly splendors and spiritrual anxieties. As a result, they never slip over the line into extravagance...Morri Creech's language 'forges its burnished imprint on the river' of our own consciousness...[D]azzling."—Susan Ludvigson

"The biblical, as both testament and revelation, is important to this poet the way the mythical is vital to so many others. It is the informing adjective of his imagination and the modifier through which his personal world and the natural world are transformed...His writing fills with light."—Stanley Plumly

"In a book centered on the pastoral, Creech weaves form into the delicate description of raw, Southern landscapes. He relishes the textured fields of his childhood and the layered histories that the land evokes. Creech spends much of the book unearthing these stories … but, over time, they seem to take a backseat to the process of recovery itself. In the title poem … Creech lifts, layer by layer, time's influence on the summer soil: 'as if you could prize from weeds and loam one immaculate/ hour, one orient pearl buried at the damp root, and lift it clear/ of the years of corn stalks, furrows, hay rakes freckled with scat—.' The fourth, and last, trochee, in a list that serves to relay the weight of the waste, 'freckled' is the perfect word to describe Creech’s memories—sun-worn and spotted. While Creech's poetry also explores mythology and science, his personal poems make Creech's doubts beautiful, memorable, and poignant. He makes the reader question his own past and the facility with which it can be restored."—Callie Siskel

"Aptly enough, Creech's second collection is the first winner of a prize named after the late Anthony Hecht, who with Richard Wilbur upheld the standard of formal poetry in the generation of American poets that came of age in the 1940s. There are a great many more formalists in or just ahead of Creech's contingent (he was born in 1970), but perhaps none combines gravity and grace as he does. Those qualities are consciously and consequentially on his mind in the three poems constituting 'Some Notes on Grace and Gravity,' which consider how Giotto, Leonardo, and Newton, respectively, confirmed the interdependence of grace and gravity. The muralist draws the feet of holy figures to the ground, the painter-scientist turns from rendering saintly flesh to sundering cadavers, and the theoretician unites gravity and grace, mass and motion, materially. If those poems concern the infusion of the sacred into the profane, others mourn modernity's willful alienation from the sacred, quite often by imaging gods in exile, as in the three poems, placed early, middle, and late in the book, about the travails of Orpheus. Besides such grave pieces, there is much that is witty. Throughout, there is a use of the European poetic tradition that is as gratifying and profound as it is assured. This man's good."—Ray Olson (Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved)

"FIELD KNOWLEDGE is intelligent, remarkably dexterous and inventive in its use of form, and—line by line—often dazzling, like 'the sprinkler's lisp and hiss / trailing a veil of diamond through the air.' The book is also playful, sometimes very funny—exploring, for example, angels whose heaven involves a trashy casino. Such gifts make FIELD KNOWLEDGE one of the strongest collections this reviewer has read in years."—Benjamin S. Grossman

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