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Approaching the Fields: Poems
Elegiac and fierce, solemn and celebratory, the poems in Chanda Feldman’s Approaching the Fields consider family and history. From black sharecroppers and subsistence farmers along the Mississippi River to contemporary life in the suburbs, the rituals of home and work link racial experience, social lines, and economic striving, rooting memory and scene in the southern landscape. Love and violence echo through the collection, and Feldman’s beautifully crafted poems, often formal in style, answer them sometimes with an embrace and sometimes with a turning away. She witnesses the crop fields and manicured lawns, the dinner table and birthing room, the church and juke joint, conveying the ways that everyday details help build a life.These evocative poems bring to life a rich and complex world, both timely and timeless.
64 pages, Paperback
First published February 5, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 13, 2020
These poems tell stories based on the personal history of her mother’s sharecropping family and her father’s subsistence farming family in the pre-Civil Rights south. The work paints a vivid picture of rural life, as in “Election Day,” which begins with a pretty image of a picnic:
No one picked in the fields on Election Day—
The trucks drove us to a picnic on the Bluff.
The children sang songs like it was Sunday.
We ate salads, melons, and iced cakes.
and ends, five stanzas later, more somberly:
The men, one by one, signed for their ballots.
The man you sharecropped for chose your say.
No one picked in the fields on Election Day.
The children sang songs like it was Sunday.
No one picked in the fields on Election Day—
The trucks drove us to a picnic on the Bluff.
The children sang songs like it was Sunday.
We ate salads, melons, and iced cakes.
and ends, five stanzas later, more somberly:
The men, one by one, signed for their ballots.
The man you sharecropped for chose your say.
No one picked in the fields on Election Day.
The children sang songs like it was Sunday.
April 1, 2021
Approaching The Fields is an origin story of the poet's Tennessee family, particularly their difficult lives as sharecroppers in the Mississippi Valley. My favorite of the book's four sections is "But We Lived," a "crown" of sonnets (a group of 14 poems using the 14-line restriction for sonnets, though these are unrhymed) based on family stories and slices of life from the post-Jim Crow era. Perhaps my favorite poem in the collection is the first poem of this section, likely because I always ask myself how so many of the Black people who didn't leave the South during the Great Migration managed from day to day-I'm thinking of living with the knowledge that a White person could kill a Black person with virtual impunity in that time. This poem, in a sense, answers my question. They did what they had to do.
1. But We Lived
But we lived, my mother told me, day to
day. It always was and we never thought
it wouldn’t be – separate entrances
at the doctor’s, dentist, the fabric store, or
the places we knew not to go. The lines
and the laws and the signs, as you saw
in Eyes on the Prize on TV. When
the law changed – I had two cousins, they said,
y’all can go to the white school now, it’s our
right. Twins. They signed up, they went.
Nobody minded them. They sat in class,
had lunch on the lawn. One full grade report –
the teachers flunked them in every subject.
After that they came back to the black school.
Here, the narrator speaks of a Pyrrhic brand of privilege:
3. Friday Night
My parents gave me permission to go
to the Ritz Movie Palace on Fridays.
First we frolicked at the café, no first,
we got fish filleted at the fish market.
You took it to the café and they fried it
with potato slices. Families ate early,
me with my mama and step-daddy,
everybody in pressed dresses and slacks.
Later, the children went home, the adults
stayed, danced, drank. I still had to pay
for movies, but I didn’t have to sit
in the colored gallery. We sharecropped
for the owners. I sat with the whites.
Everybody knew better than to complain.
"Baptism" speaks to the type of voyeurism segregation could inspire.
10. Baptism
One by one – they’d wade into the pond
we used as a baptismal pool in the side fields
where my family sharecropped. Our church
across the road, an old two-lane highway
dropping down from uptown to the river’s
Chickasaw Bluff. As far as the road went –
sandbags, a sign said TERMINUS, for years
as far as I’d ever traveled.
A rerouted stream
fed the little pond. One by one, the minister
lowered the people beneath, raised them up,
drew away the handkerchief from their eyes.
The whole time watching, a few whites
staring down at us from the highway shoulder.
Reading "My Mother's Father," I thought of something I've watched recently (think it was Netflix's powerful "Amend" series on the 14th Amendment) in which someone mentioned how the value of Black lives dropped in the eyes of post-Reconstruction White Southerners who could no longer own them. For that reason, the lynchings that became so symbolic of the South after the Civil War weren't "expensive" to White people.
12. My Mother’s Father
You had to be on your deathbed to stay in
from the fields, otherwise you went.
My daddy, one Friday night, shot
and killed a man. Sat in jail for two days.
Monday dawn the guard slides open the cell,
throws in a pair of daddy’s work clothes.
The landowner in the car waiting to drive him.
My daddy never went back for a conviction –
killing a black man wasn’t enough
to keep him from chopping cotton. Even now,
someone’s son or daughter has a run-in
with the police, some black folk call on these
old connections, see if the white family
their families worked for can ease the sentencing.
Other faves from this section include "Taint" and "On the Porch."
The book's fourth section contains only the gorgeous "Priming Light," a poem worthy of its own room. Here, the narrator asks to be buried
where my ancestors are buried...
covering my body will be a good humus,
The loam of pin oaks and hickories...
Let me escape, O middday heat, to the north side
Of the house. Let me lie on my grandparents' bead,
Where their sex made thirteen children, let me
Sniff their scents there...
The subject of race in America is always a heavy lift, but Feldman's first collection manages to come in at a tidy 51 pages. So it's not an onerous read, and one can see from these excerpts that the story doesn't require her to go into the type of abstraction that scares many away from poetry. Prof. Feldman, who teaches creative writing at Oberlin College, was a 2019 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Poetry Award nominee for this beautiful collection, which I highly recommend.
1. But We Lived
But we lived, my mother told me, day to
day. It always was and we never thought
it wouldn’t be – separate entrances
at the doctor’s, dentist, the fabric store, or
the places we knew not to go. The lines
and the laws and the signs, as you saw
in Eyes on the Prize on TV. When
the law changed – I had two cousins, they said,
y’all can go to the white school now, it’s our
right. Twins. They signed up, they went.
Nobody minded them. They sat in class,
had lunch on the lawn. One full grade report –
the teachers flunked them in every subject.
After that they came back to the black school.
Here, the narrator speaks of a Pyrrhic brand of privilege:
3. Friday Night
My parents gave me permission to go
to the Ritz Movie Palace on Fridays.
First we frolicked at the café, no first,
we got fish filleted at the fish market.
You took it to the café and they fried it
with potato slices. Families ate early,
me with my mama and step-daddy,
everybody in pressed dresses and slacks.
Later, the children went home, the adults
stayed, danced, drank. I still had to pay
for movies, but I didn’t have to sit
in the colored gallery. We sharecropped
for the owners. I sat with the whites.
Everybody knew better than to complain.
"Baptism" speaks to the type of voyeurism segregation could inspire.
10. Baptism
One by one – they’d wade into the pond
we used as a baptismal pool in the side fields
where my family sharecropped. Our church
across the road, an old two-lane highway
dropping down from uptown to the river’s
Chickasaw Bluff. As far as the road went –
sandbags, a sign said TERMINUS, for years
as far as I’d ever traveled.
A rerouted stream
fed the little pond. One by one, the minister
lowered the people beneath, raised them up,
drew away the handkerchief from their eyes.
The whole time watching, a few whites
staring down at us from the highway shoulder.
Reading "My Mother's Father," I thought of something I've watched recently (think it was Netflix's powerful "Amend" series on the 14th Amendment) in which someone mentioned how the value of Black lives dropped in the eyes of post-Reconstruction White Southerners who could no longer own them. For that reason, the lynchings that became so symbolic of the South after the Civil War weren't "expensive" to White people.
12. My Mother’s Father
You had to be on your deathbed to stay in
from the fields, otherwise you went.
My daddy, one Friday night, shot
and killed a man. Sat in jail for two days.
Monday dawn the guard slides open the cell,
throws in a pair of daddy’s work clothes.
The landowner in the car waiting to drive him.
My daddy never went back for a conviction –
killing a black man wasn’t enough
to keep him from chopping cotton. Even now,
someone’s son or daughter has a run-in
with the police, some black folk call on these
old connections, see if the white family
their families worked for can ease the sentencing.
Other faves from this section include "Taint" and "On the Porch."
The book's fourth section contains only the gorgeous "Priming Light," a poem worthy of its own room. Here, the narrator asks to be buried
where my ancestors are buried...
covering my body will be a good humus,
The loam of pin oaks and hickories...
Let me escape, O middday heat, to the north side
Of the house. Let me lie on my grandparents' bead,
Where their sex made thirteen children, let me
Sniff their scents there...
The subject of race in America is always a heavy lift, but Feldman's first collection manages to come in at a tidy 51 pages. So it's not an onerous read, and one can see from these excerpts that the story doesn't require her to go into the type of abstraction that scares many away from poetry. Prof. Feldman, who teaches creative writing at Oberlin College, was a 2019 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Poetry Award nominee for this beautiful collection, which I highly recommend.
November 20, 2018
This has a nice selection of poems. They are mostly about family in a time when there were slaves who worked for others.
August 7, 2026
Poems of family, poems of place, poems of history, poems of making do, getting by, loving, living, thriving.
Read
December 3, 2018“I am a river, / rocks are memory: I turn them, / rub them until the rough rounds and is no longer / a sharp to carry.”’—From poem “Headwaters”
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews