Field Folly Snow Poems [Paperback]

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.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.

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.

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.

This poetry collection demands close reading and deep engagement to follow its levels of lî