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Field Light
In Field Light Owen Lewis meditates on the fluidity of time in poems and short prose passages distinguished by considerable lyric and narrative dexterity. Here, the past is many layered, cyclical, and complex, voices and stories in a tapestry of generations resonating in our shared present. Deep in the folds of history, the Berkshires comes to life through the eyes of this poet who inhabits his work as both observer and actor. Imagine W.E.B. Dubois admonishing the head of a local mental hospital, “Sociology. Isn’t that what we all now need?” Or the Lincoln who sits in his Washington D.C. Memorial, sculpted in the Berkshires, summoning malls of current day protestors. This is a book vast in social thought, in narrative, and, most of all, in exceptional poetry. —Kevin Prufer
It is tempting to describe Owen Lewis’s exceptional new book, Field Light, as an excavation of American and personal history. The book centers on the site of an old house in Stockbridge Massachusetts, which Lewis took full possession of in 2011 following a divorce. However, “excavation” is too plodding a noun to accurately characterize the qualities of this book in which poetry, scholarly footnotes, and photographs vie with one another to recall and recreate this vivid book’s geographical and emotional landscape. Field Light is history as free fall— a restless book in which past and present, the historical and the personal, the significant and the incidental interrupt and chafe against each other. In one dizzying footnote, for example, a reader learns that Arlo Guthrie’s anti-war protest song “Alice’s Restaurant” takes place in Stockbridge and, that the site of Norman Rockwell’s first studio in Stockbridge was situated above the restaurant. If an epic is a poem with history in it,” Field Light is most certainly an epic of a particularly original and intimate sort. I highly recommend Field Light for both its verve and its serious ethical concerns. —Lynn Emanuel
It is tempting to describe Owen Lewis’s exceptional new book, Field Light, as an excavation of American and personal history. The book centers on the site of an old house in Stockbridge Massachusetts, which Lewis took full possession of in 2011 following a divorce. However, “excavation” is too plodding a noun to accurately characterize the qualities of this book in which poetry, scholarly footnotes, and photographs vie with one another to recall and recreate this vivid book’s geographical and emotional landscape. Field Light is history as free fall— a restless book in which past and present, the historical and the personal, the significant and the incidental interrupt and chafe against each other. In one dizzying footnote, for example, a reader learns that Arlo Guthrie’s anti-war protest song “Alice’s Restaurant” takes place in Stockbridge and, that the site of Norman Rockwell’s first studio in Stockbridge was situated above the restaurant. If an epic is a poem with history in it,” Field Light is most certainly an epic of a particularly original and intimate sort. I highly recommend Field Light for both its verve and its serious ethical concerns. —Lynn Emanuel
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Published June 1, 2020
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