The Lesser Fields (Colorado Prize for Poetry)
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.(Jan.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.