The Lesser Fields

by Rob Schlegel

"Rob Schlegel has a mind of winter. Like the painter Morandi, Schlegel makes a world of absence and deprivation-our world, the world of human mortality-feel like plenitude. Imagine wanting to discover the place where you yourself 'have not yet happened.' Now imagine creating this place in a language of hard-won precision-a diction and syntax so elegantly austere that the smallest gesture becomes an explosion of possibility. The result is a book that feels rivetingly contemporary while resembling nothing else, a book that seems shockingly intimate while giving nothing away. The Lesser Fields is a guide-book to the world we've always known but never truly seen." James Longenbach, final judge In The Lesser Fields, Rob Schlegel takes a lit match to the surfaces of his words in an act of poetic arson. Thus the poet wanders a landscape whose commonplace markers-fish, sea, trees, birds-are made disquietingly strange: Before my mind / Can shape it, presence / Finishes a thought in my fingers. The natural world of language manifests with an incendiary beauty at once tender and dangerous, reckless and precise. This poetry burns subtly, but the heat is unmistakable. Elizabeth Robinson

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Rob Schlegel serves as co-editor of The Catenary Press, which is dedicated to publishing long poems. His writing has appeared in Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Jacket2, New American Writing, The Volta, and elsewhere. Born in Portland, Oregon, he has lived most recently in Iowa, Montana, and Washington.

Reviews

[Lenora Good · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry should live on the page, or if need be, die on the page. Schlegel brings his poetry to life, and when necessary, to death on the page. And he does so with great beauty and tenderness.

This collection of short poems will feed you. They will bring smiles for the very beauty of his words. The images he evokes will, if you're a poet, bring jealousy that he wrote the words, evoked the images, and not you.

I had every intention of reading, and savoring, these poems one at a time. To limit myself to one per night. Well, you know about intentions and using them to pave certain highways – I gulped these poems over three nights. Many I went back and re-read, then re-read them again.

I am delighted to have this book in my library, and look forward to many evenings of reading it again. And again.

[Wren]

Scarce are the fields
laid bare by these words

Notable Poems: "Lives of Modrow", "Lives of Empire", "Economy of Winter"