The Usable Field

by Jane Mead

These lyric elegies, spoken by the “under-self,” become a series of subtle chants which sing the speaker into being both physically and spiritually, and through which Mead seeks solace, enlightenment, and joy in the cycles of life and death in the natural world.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2008

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

A highly anticipated release for me. And I was lucky enough to read it in a quiet apartment. The electricity was out because of the hurricane. In that silence I felt Mead's silence, her way of creating an emotional landscape, wide as it is deep, with each word treading through that space easily and deliberately. It is a quiet book, with grief as its subject, while openly admitting words are only slight referents to such a subject.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The language Mead shares with the devout she fiercely, tenderly, makes herself subject to, in a trope, not from religious life, but from business: the speaker enacts an "audit," for which, however, these poems feel no less devout. I think her language is "the usable field" in The Usable Field. A resemblance, flesh of Christ in groundwork -- this she will call "The Part -- and the Whole of It:" "Stocking the globe is not | my issue, taking stock | is my issue, and deciding" what this fifty year old woman should do (Mead is a vintner, a bookstore owner, and a companionable friend in the art form of poetry for many in "the field").

Just so, the words feel a deep responsibility. The collection is not perfect; in "Labyrinth," for instance, an "expression," toward which, as Ira Sadof shrewdly tells us on the back cover, the "longing tends," is so carefully rhetoricized within the stylistics of the Book of Common Prayer that it can feel like the statement has never emerged. The truth-telling is rich and "revolutionary," as Jane Miller reminds us (also on the back cover) to see, but the ethos can sometimes, in this collection, written in the post-revolutionary moment of a decision to return to her California ranch after her father's death (the volume is dedicated to the poet's father, Giles Mead, who was a Harvard ichthyologist and the namesake-scion of the Union Carbide co-founder), feel chastened by the very death that we suspect is its occasion. Nonetheless, in poem after poem here, I am taken by the psychologically intensifying encounter of words "calling" after Mead's awareness in them of a clarifying telling of burden and responsibility.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Early on in Jane Mead’s third collection, The Usable Field, in the poem,“The Part – and the Whole of it,” Mead states “Stocking the globe is not/ my issue, taking stock is my issue – and deciding /what to do next.” And this is indeed a collection that is all about collecting one’s self and taking a deep breath. And for readers of Mead, this probably comes as a necessary relief after the poet’s very intense House of Poured Out Waters. The poet seems, after the trauma and violence of her previous collections, to now be at a desired crossroads as she tramps the fields with her dog (or dogs), surveying the world around her, her place in it. That’s pretty standard stuff in poetryville, but Mead’s poems bring both precision and weight to this familiar journey. Jane Mead is a special poet, and following her development makes for some essential poetry reading. But if you read her, please read her previous effort, House of Poured-Out Waters, since The Usable Field seems, to my reading, to be a natural outgrowth from that collection. I would also suggest her first collection, The Lord and the General Din of the World, which has many fine poems in it, but is radically different in style.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved how Mead creates physical texture in her lines. She writes about nature and sense impressions with jagged sensitivity. I also deeply appreciated that her poems were about loss, about the pain of losing loved ones, about the soul-searching that occurs in coping, in finding her place in the cosmos.

[Allyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really, really liked this book.

More later.

[Kasey Jueds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, strange, and deeply quiet--I loved it.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This much
is still available: it is
no wonder that the light
was laced — there were trees
everywhere along the banks.
No wonder that she didn’t
have a name for what
compelled her: in fall
the patterns of geese
told a story about patterns
of geese in spring. The girl
charmed the world, she made
what she saw into something
to see her.” - “The Crypt of the House”

[Corie Sanford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mead's poetry collections read like a symphony, with melodies and phrases that come back over and over. Her language is so plain, in some ways, but the things she makes it do are absolutely breathtaking.