Fielder's Choice

by Elise Partridge

Filled with rich evocations of childhood, travel, and landscape, Fielder’s Choice delivers fresh and striking elegiac poems that grapple with their subjects vigorously, unpredictably, and without sentimentality. Partridge’s poetry combines a gifted ear for the vernacular and exuberant verbal skills with an exceptional—and often emotionally powerful—lyric intelligence.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2002

About the author

Elise Partridge (1958–2015) was born in Philadelphia and grew up nearby. After graduating from Harvard in 1981, she received a second Bachelor of Arts from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a Marshall Scholar. She returned to Harvard for a Master of Arts and then took a degree in writing from Boston University. In 1992 she moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she lived with her husband, a teacher of medieval literature, for the rest of her life. She taught writing and literature at several universities. Fielder’s Choice (2002) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poems published in Canada. Chameleon Hours (2008) won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 2009, and was a finalist for the BC Book Prize that year. Her third book, The Exiles’ Gallery, was published in 2015. Partridge’s work has been anthologized in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Southwest Review, Yale Review, Slate, The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, PN Review, and Poetry Ireland Review.

Reviews

[George Ilsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rural childhood, a snake in the barn with a frog in its mouth — the pause of life and death.

A kitten follows Steve home — how did it scent your benevolence?

Four lectures by Robert Lowell, 1977; two of them on Walt Whitman. Whitman's "Goodbye My Fancy" was intended as his last poem . . . you're too sick to write your last poem, when the time comes.

When Elise Partridge was dying, she knew The Exiles' Gallery would be her last collection, and was meticulous to the very end.

In this volume, "Dislocations" celebrates strays in unexpected locales; "your tendrils / tangle so tightly around themselves / they refuse the offerings / of the new soil."

Arsenals of eggs, scabbed dumpster hulking just outside, a sad-eyed monkey, "A bird swaying on a pole of sedge / sang two notes that might have been 'Name me.'"

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

I keep thinking that Canadian poetry will one day be good but alas I am always disappointed! Every Canadian Poet wants to be crozier and Atwood but why? This was just horrible and not really worth my 50 cents at the thrift store! Ohh well!!