EBOOK
About
The chairs have come in
and the crisp yellow thwock
of the ball being hit
says somehow, now that it's fall,
I'm a memory of myself.
My whole old life-
I mourn you sometimes
in places you would have been.
-October
The poems in this fierce debut are an attempt to record what matters. As a reporter's dispatches, they concern themselves with different forms of desolation: what it means to feel at home in wrecked places and then to experience loneliness and dislocation in the familiar. The collection arcs between internal and external worlds- the disappointment of returning, the guilt and thrill of departure, unexpected encounters in blighted places- and, with ruthless observations etched in the sparest lines, the poems in Wideawake Field sharply and movingly navigate the poles of home and away.
and the crisp yellow thwock
of the ball being hit
says somehow, now that it's fall,
I'm a memory of myself.
My whole old life-
I mourn you sometimes
in places you would have been.
-October
The poems in this fierce debut are an attempt to record what matters. As a reporter's dispatches, they concern themselves with different forms of desolation: what it means to feel at home in wrecked places and then to experience loneliness and dislocation in the familiar. The collection arcs between internal and external worlds- the disappointment of returning, the guilt and thrill of departure, unexpected encounters in blighted places- and, with ruthless observations etched in the sparest lines, the poems in Wideawake Field sharply and movingly navigate the poles of home and away.
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Reviews
"Eliza Griswold's WIDEAWAKE FIELD is a book of compelling authority by a young poet who already understands, and stands ready to renew, poetry's most ancient tasks--to bring the news, to sing the human in the midst of its destruction, to register truths, to open our eyes. The broken world is one world in her poems. She draws tenderness from brutality, an idyll from a panic, and lyric not from in
Susan Stewart
"Some of the strengths of Eliza Griswold's first book are immediately apparent. They include an assured authority of tone, language of repeatedly astonishing transparency, images that emerge out of each poem's invisible source, vivid and revelatory even when they appear to overlap like double exposures. Her subjects are raw, wrenching, and she makes them ours. This is writing of true originality,
W.S. Merwin