Field Folly Snow

Poems

Title Details

Pages: 96

Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 02/29/2008

ISBN: 9-780-8203-3117-1

List Price: $20.95

Related Subjects

POETRY / American / General

Field Folly Snow

Poems

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  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Awards
The poems in this collection are meditations on the natural world, written from the perspective of what Li-Young Lee has aptly termed "a passionate interiority." The history and geography of the American West inspire many of the poems' investigations of the environment and the role of the individual in relation to that environment. In Cecily Parks's landscape made strange by human consciousness, being lost is a requirement, though not a guarantee, of being found.

What an intriguing book. Parks isn’t trying to close the coffin lid on language. This is fresh work with a surpassingly delicate sense of language. This is a totally admirable volume.

—Jim Harrison

The pure joy and almost childlike playfulness of speech-making is evident in every poem. On the other hand, the mind in these poems wrestles relentlessly with sense, trying to find sense, trying to uncover meaning through various uses of intense perception, finely crafted description, and lyric resolution. . . . The poems in this collection transfigure the world, allowing the reader to experience landscapes haunted by a passionate interiority.

—Li-Young Lee, from the introduction to Cold Work

The sharp, pastoral imagery of Parks's debut is set ablaze by an ominous tone and the author's fine musical ear. Her tight tercets and prose blocks convey a sense of isolation, which, when broken by the appearance of someone other than the speaker, is as jarring as a rock heaved into a still pond.

Publishers Weekly

This poetry collection demands close reading and deep engagement to follow its levels of found material and its internal discoveries, and these poems are worth the effort.

New Letters

Runner-up

Norma Farber First Book Award, Poetry Society of America

Runner-up

Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, Shenandoah and Washington and Lee University

About the Author/Editor

CECILY PARKS's chapbook, Cold Work, won the 2005 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including Best New Poets 2007 and Tin House, and she has an essay in A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise: Twenty Young Writers on Finding a Place in the Natural World.