
Field Light
Summer End-The Dormouse, Glendale, Massachusetts, 1991-2018
Owen Lewis(Author)
DOS Madres Press
Published on 11. June 2020
Book
Paperback/Softback
148 pages
978-1-948017-71-8 (ISBN)
Description
Field Light, written as an extended, multi-sectioned poem that moves in and out of prose, is a personal and historical exploration of the Berkshires through poetry and prose. Physician-poet Owen Lewis becomes a figure in his own epic as he learns to see himself and the abounding history that lives in the towns of western Massachusetts. From the writers Hawthorne, Melville, nearby Stanley Kunitz, Chris Gilbert and others, to artists Daniel Chester French, his daughter Peggy Cresson and Norman Rockwell, from the young lawyer Theodor Sedgwick who undertook a trial in 1781 to free Elizabeth Mumbet ending slavery in Massachusetts, to civil rights champion W.E.B. Du Bois, to Arlo Guthrie, to physician Austen Riggs and his psychiatric hospital, to Gertrude Smith and the founding of Tanglewood, Field Light investigates layered histories to create a compelling cultural, political and social narrative, with its cycles of privilege and racism, that continues to unfold. It is the story of finding one's voice amid many voices, and the importance of the community of voices.
SAMPLE:
(1991)
In rain, I first saw the house,
shingled in Dormouse gray.
Through streaked windows
of wavering glass its fields wild,
impenetrable November
weather raising a dog's musty
history-scent, others' histories,
not a New York smell inside.
(Underfoot, a wall-to-wall patch-
work of multi-colored carpet
remnants covering up
the old chestnut floors,
the toddlers each chose
a carpet square as home-base.)
I heard the agent say-
No ghosts!-but overhead
quick-clicking ceiling feet
scamper the attic, red squirrels
and gray racing the dark.
From the eaves flying-squirrels
jumping into the mist.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight
226 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-948017-71-8 (9781948017718)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Owen Lewis is the author of four collections of poetry and three chapbooks. Honors include the 2024 E.E.Cummings Prize, the 2023 Guernsey International Poetry Prize, the 2023 Rumi Prize for Poetry, the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. At Columbia University he is Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and teaches Narrative Medicine.