The Usable Field
By Jane Mead
(Alice James Books, Paperback, 9781882295692, 96pp.)
Publication Date: May 2008
Categories: American - General
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These lyric elegies, spoken by the “under-self,” become a series of subtle chants which sing the speaker into being both physically and spiritually, and through which Mead seeks solace, enlightenment, and joy in the cycles of life and death in the natural world.
Jane Mead is the author of two previous collections of poetry, House of Poured-Out Waters and The Lord and the General Din of the World. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. For many years the Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she now manages the family ranch in northern California.
“Jane Mead’s our Emily Dickinson, our most ambitious solitary. Her austere poems are brilliant: endlessly inventive, syntactically, tonally and emotionally rich. Alternately ironic and undefended, she never sacrifices compassion, justice, her quest for pleasure. In their longing and their loneliness, tending to the otherness of nature, the beauty of expression, these poems honor the frailty that makes us most human.”—Ira Sadoff
"With each of her books, Jane Mead develops a more economical, unique language for grief, and for the yearning toward wholeness. Confessional detail and philosophical argument are reduced to traces, but their resonance from underneath leaves no doubt that this work is serious. This is a book I will be living with for a long time to come."—Alan Williamson
"Jane Mead penetrates grief with alacrity and burning self-scrutiny. This work enters the world like wild rain and lightning, an inheritance from Celan’s and Tsvetaeva’s stuttered lyricism. Those who can brave the revolutions in her music will choose life because of its difficulty."—Jane Miller
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