The Lightning Field

by Carol Moldaw

In her third collection, Carol Moldaw explores new territory in poems that are thematically far-reaching and technically superb. The book includes three long sequences based on art and artifact in various stages of completeness: preliminary pen-and-ink studies, Turkish ruins, and, at the center, the site-specific art installation that gives the book its title and impetus. Attracting charged material as a lightning field attracts lightning, the poems reference narrative but move beneath and beyond it through a restless and rewarding insistence on making and remaking, on seeing by degrees and seeing whole.

Genres: Poetry

79 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2003

About the author

Carol Moldaw is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently, Go Figure (Four Way Books, 2024), and one novella, The Widening (Etruscan Books, 2008). Her poetry collection The Lightning Field (Oberlin Press, 2002) won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize, and Through the Window (La Alameda Press, 2001) was translated into Turkish and published in a bi-lingual edition in Istanbul. A volume of her selected poems translated into Chinese is forthcoming from Guangxi University Press (Beijing) in 2025. Moldaw is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer’s Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, and her work is published widely in journals, including AGNI, Antioch Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Threepenny Review, and Triquarterly. It has also been anthologized in many venues, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, and Under 35: A New Generation of American Poets. As noted in The New Yorker, Moldaw’s work “repeatedly achieves lyric junctures of shivering beauty.” About The Lightning Field, Frieda Gardner wrote in The Women’s Review of Books: “She courts revelation . . . in a voice variously curious, passionate, surprised, meditative, and sensual. On the surface of her work are rich sound and variation of rhythm and line. A few steps deeper in lie wells of feeling and complexities of thought.” From 2005-2008 Moldaw was on the faculty of Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine’s low-residency M.F.A. program, and she has been a recurrent Vistiing Writer at the Vermont Studio Center, taught at the College of Santa Fe and in the MFA program at Naropa University. In the spring of 2011, she served as the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University. Currently, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and teaches privately. A complete list of her books can be found at www.carolmoldaw.com.

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

811.54 M717 2003

[Robert Alicea · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were points where I was struggling to complete this series of poems. There were some poems that didn't transition well. I applaud the effort in taking art and writing about it as an exercise, but nothing too strong in imagery stood out in my mind. The poems were smooth, but at times extended their welcome with elongated phrases and unnecessary metaphors. The poems have intentional force behind them; I found it to be clouded by a large vocabulary mostly used out of context.
Poems shine through it all, though. "Pelagos" is a wonderful bit; I also enjoyed the focus on oracles in a section of a longer poem on page 63.
I would suggest reading this, because it may appeal to you in a different way. I felt distant reading these, but there are tests of light that brighten the sharpness of the lightning field.