The Lesser Fields

by Rob Schlegel

Winner of the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

"Schlegel's debut, winner of the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry, presents a stark, haunted landscape, as expansive as it is lonesome and yet quietly inviting. It's a world where the mind projects its solitude onto nature while nature returns the favor. 'Here and not here,' says Schlegel, 'I breath away/ the parts of myself I no longer require. /A lost lover knits with the natural world after death (Tonight, her name is a leaf covering/ my left eye. The right I close/ for the wind to stitch shut with thread/ from the dress she wore into the grave/ where the determined roots of the tree/ are making a braid around her body);/ elsewhere another lover is able to /fill the bath with everything that has/ Or could ever happen between us,/ imbuing everyday domestic tasks like bathing with symbolic portent in language both straightforward and seductive. A series of haiku-like /November Deaths ekes out little truths (/But for the tip of land/ At which the vessel is aimed/ There is nothing to steady its course/) and another series of Lives asks, in various ways, /Toward what am I drawn?/ Answers are everywhere in this promising first book."
—Publisher's Weekly

"Rob Schlegel has a mind of winter. Like the painter Morandi, Schlegel makes a world of absence and deprivation—our world, the world of human mortality—feel like plenitude. Imagine wanting to discover the place where you yourself 'have not yet happened.' Now imagine creating this place in a language of hard-won precision-a diction and syntax so elegantly austere that the smallest gesture becomes an explosion of possibility. The result is a book that feels rivetingly contemporary while resembling nothing else, a book that seems shockingly intimate while giving nothing away. The Lesser Fields is a guide-book to the world we've always known but never truly seen."
—James Longenbach, final judge

"In The Lesser Fields, Rob Schlegel takes a lit match to the surfaces of his words in an act of poetic arson. Thus the poet wanders a landscape whose commonplace markers—fish, sea, trees, birds—are made disquietingly strange: 'Before my mind / Can shape it, presence / Finishes a thought in my fingers.' The natural world of language manifests with an incendiary beauty at once tender and dangerous, reckless and precise. This poetry burns subtly, but the heat is unmistakable."
—Elizabeth Robinson

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Rob Schlegel serves as co-editor of The Catenary Press, which is dedicated to publishing long poems. His writing has appeared in Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Jacket2, New American Writing, The Volta, and elsewhere. Born in Portland, Oregon, he has lived most recently in Iowa, Montana, and Washington.

Reviews

[Lenora Good · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry should live on the page, or if need be, die on the page. Schlegel brings his poetry to life, and when necessary, to death on the page. And he does so with great beauty and tenderness.

This collection of short poems will feed you. They will bring smiles for the very beauty of his words. The images he evokes will, if you're a poet, bring jealousy that he wrote the words, evoked the images, and not you.

I had every intention of reading, and savoring, these poems one at a time. To limit myself to one per night. Well, you know about intentions and using them to pave certain highways – I gulped these poems over three nights. Many I went back and re-read, then re-read them again.

I am delighted to have this book in my library, and look forward to many evenings of reading it again. And again.

[Wren]

Scarce are the fields
laid bare by these words

Notable Poems: "Lives of Modrow", "Lives of Empire", "Economy of Winter"