Analysis
Edward Field’s poetry is distinguished by its casualness, a characteristic he cultivated deliberately in a reaction to the obscurity of much modern poetry. His verse tends to be conversational in tone, syntax, and vocabulary, and usually nothing is concealed. It is easy for the reader to forget that Field is a trained musician and actor, yet perhaps these forms of competence contribute to the power that sometimes emerges in his work.
Stand Up, Friend, with Me
Field’s poetic voice represents the casually personal, often responding to incongruities and offering a city-dweller’s bemusement at the persistence of nature. In Stand Up, Friend, with Me, for example, he describes goats, donkeys, a porcupine, and a walrus. He illustrates his own experience with plants in the city. In “Tulips and Addresses,” he describes how he acquired some discarded tulip bulbs and carried them about with him for months before he found a home. He concludes:
Now I am living on Abingdon Square, not the Ritz exactly, but a place And I have planted the tulips in my window box: Please God make them come up, so that everyone who passes by Will know I’m there, at least long enough to catch my breath, When they see the bright red beautiful flowers in my window.
A similar note sounds in “The Garden,” where, after describing the exotic plants he has sprouted from seed in his home, he celebrates his participation in this collection of living things: “We have formed a colony in a strange land/ Planting our seeds and making ourselves at home.”
The dominant note is the assertion of the importance of the unaffectedly personal, a theme announced in the volume’s prologue, where, beginning with an image of the universe, Field zooms in on the surface of the earth, quickly focusing on New York and then on “this house, upstairs and through the wide open door/ Of the front bedroom with a window on the world,” concluding, “Look, friend, at me.”
Variety Photoplays
Variety Photoplays includes a number of treatments of Hollywood films. According to poets Stetler and Locklin, “Field has discovered and exploited the full mythological potential of old movies.” These poems have such titles as “Curse of the Cat Woman,” “Frankenstein,” “Bride of Frankenstein,” and “The Life of Joan Crawford,” and they offer colloquial résumés of Hollywood films and themes. Each is a sort of dramatic monologue, a self-contained entertainment. Field’s poems in fact often present comical moments that dramatize small events, as in “Plant Poems,” where he assumes the persona of a scientist:
As the leading agronomist in the Kharkov Agricultural Institute I want to announce the discovery that plants feel as we do . . . . . . . . . and when you chop up a lettuce it is saying Ouch.
A Full Heart
The publication in 1977 of A Full Heart drew fire from reviewer M. L. Rosenthal, a literary critic and editor of William Butler Yeats. Rosenthal strongly objected to what he saw as the “indefatigably prosaic” dimension of Field’s poetry, a dimension that Field himself was later to defend by explaining, “I use a local New York syntax, a kind of Jewish syntax that New Yorkers use in everyday life,” and “it seems to me that poetry should be easier to read than prose.” Since much of A Full Heart presents Field’s coming to terms with his most important personal relationships, Rosenthal found this casually phrased confessional mode self-indulgent and facile.
“A Full Heart” describes Field’s Polish immigrant mother and her sisters, “loving women” whose burdened and unappreciated lives included only the most modest consolations. “Gone Blind” describes the impact on...
(This entire section contains 1700 words.)
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Field of his companion’s blindness; it concludes: “Gone blind/ he has brought me light.” “Visiting Home” is a long reflection on the poet’s relationship with his parents, and this meditation ends with an acceptance that, if qualified, has a tone of resolution: “I am my father’s son./ Even if I can’t stand it, still/ I am.”
Despite Field’s normal aversion to symbolism or implication, the poem “Sharks” reads very much like an exercise in the figurative. Although Field was enjoying a reasonable prosperity as literary man, he was over fifty by this time, and perhaps this poem is an anticipation of future vulnerability:
Especially at evening everyone knows the sharks come in when the sun makes puddles of blood on the sea and the shadows darken. It is then, as night comes on the sharks of deep water approach the shore and beware, beware, the late swimmer.
A Frieze for a Temple of Love
A Frieze for a Temple of Love consists of three sections: a collection of Field’s verse from 1993 to 1997, a long poem titled “Silver Wings: Notes for a Screenplay,” and a largely prose conclusion titled “The Poetry File.” The short poems included in the first section fall generally into two groups, the first of which continues the Fieldian theme of demonstrating poetic freedom by focusing on sexuality and bodily functions and the second of which acknowledges the approach of death. Both groups include expressions of Field’s abiding resentment of his parents, as he remarks in “The Spirit of ’76,” “My parents have faded away at last./ I survived you two sickos, just,/ but it’s a relief to say thanks, and goodbye.” Reflecting on mortality in the final stanza of “Death Mask,” Field writes:
Life a lazy buzz then the quick sting. A long inward breath, then the sudden exhaling.
These lines carry an echo of Emily Dickinson’s “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died,” and the metaphors, unusual in Field’s poems, suggest that the poet is deliberately connecting with a tradition he has long disavowed. Other passages in the book seem to reiterate Field’s independence of that tradition.
In “Living Will,” Field explains to Derrick’s sister his preparations for death, but he makes it clear that he has not yet surrendered, for the poem ends: “May death take me/ only as I put down/ the last word.”
“Silver Wings: Notes for a Screenplay” is a narrative based on Field’s military service and love affairs as recalled fifty years later, and “The Poetry File,” though mostly in prose, is a valuable compilation of Field’s views about his own poetry and that of his contemporaries.
After the Fall
The two-part After the Fall contains twenty new poems and a selection by the poet from his past work. The “Fall” of the title is the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers in the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. In the title poem of more than two hundred lines, he contemplates the attendant suffering and loss of lives. For himself and his fellow New Yorkers, the poet articulates the sorrow of the occasion in his characteristically plain language; indeed, as if to dispel repressed memory, he describes images of the disaster baldly but reluctantly:
I don’t want to think of those inside the planes. I don’t want to think of those trapped on the high floors.
Plodding through the disaster area, the poet murmurs,
I don’t want any of this to happen but it plays over and over again.
Field likens the September 11 catastrophe to other destructive assaults in history, such as those on the Tower of Babel and the Colossus of Rhodes, and reflects that both the edifices and the civilizations that built them are fragile. This observation is in keeping with the sharp attentiveness to politics shown in his other works. Moreover, many of the other poems in After the Fall amplify on the political scene and express his deep distrust of the George W. Bush administration. For example, in “Letter on the Brink of War,” the poet likens the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the beginnings of other historical calamities: “It’s one of those points in history/ that everything turns on—” he says, “They even talk of shock and awe—/ another term for blitzkrieg’s sturm and drang,// and instead of Jews, the roundup of Muslims,/ But you have to ask, Who’s next?”
Another poem, “Homeland Security,” depicts with sardonic humor the repressive treatment of those who might arouse even a remote suspicion of terrorist leanings:
My advice to anybody who looks like an Arab these days is, when you’re in a post office or jogging around the reservoir, never stop and jot down any notes, even if it’s a great idea for a poem. . . . . . . . And when they lead you away in handcuffs don’t bother protesting your innocence and calling for a lawyer. You can’t have one—and you’re guilty.
Field declares that such pointed criticism is “how poets should be writing in this critical time,” as he puts it in “What Poetry Is For,” dedicated to the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal. It is the same conviction that gave rise to the gay rights poems in his earlier volumes, a theme he returns to in After the Fall.
Although many poems in After the Fall refer to events specific to the first decade of the twenty-first century, their significance is not limited to this era. Field avoids such limitation by showing parallels between these events and those of other times. The poems also display a natural, conversational style that belies the poetic craftsmanship that, as Field puts it, makes the language “invisible.”