Wideawake Field Poems [Paperback]

The chairs have come in
and the crisp yellow thwock
of the ball being hit
says somehow, now that it's fall,
I'm a memory of myself.
My whole old life
I mourn you sometimes
in places you would have been.
October

The poems in this fierce debut are an attempt to record what matters. As a reporter's dispatches, they concern themselves with different forms of desolation: what it means to feel at home in wrecked places and then to experience loneliness and dislocation in the familiar. The collection arcs between internal and external worldsthe disappointment of returning, the guilt and thrill of departure, unexpected encounters in blighted places and, with ruthless observations etched in the sparest lines, the poems inWideawake Fieldsharply and movingly navigate the poles of home and away.

Eliza Griswold's brief poems excel in that most difficult work of the writer-not to speak to excess and yet not to say a small thing. Her poems, which treat of both personal intimacy and of the anguish so present now in our trouble-laden world are, at the same time, concise, resonant, empathetic, angry, and luminous. Mary Oliver

Some of the strengths of Eliza Griswold's first book are immediately apparent. They include an assured authority of tone, language of repeatedly astonishing transparency, images that emerge out of each poem's invisible source, vivid and revelatory even when they appear to overlap like double exposures. Her subjects are raw, wrenching, and she makes them ours. This is writing of true originality, that seems to have started out knowing where it was going. W.S. Merwin

Eliza Griswold'sWideawake Fieldis a book of compelling authority by a young poet who already understands, and stands ready to renew, poetry's most ancient tasks--to bring the news, to sing the human in the midst of its destruction, to register truths, to open our eyes. The broken world is one worldl3a