Beasts of the Hill (Volume 28) (Field Poetry (Paperback))

Winner of the 2011 FIELD Poetry Prize Like the seventeenth-century Dutch painters who divided the space of their framed canvases into repeated geometries of rectangles and squares and light, Mark Neely writes poems that play four-square with poetry--and with the heart. And like those Dutch interiors, his poems are at once intimate and timeless. They issue from a mind as fierce as the hawks 'who circle the dead earth, waiting for some small thing to move them.' These are poems with a 'calling': they paint our lives in twenty-first-century light, 'half falling, half in flight.' --Angie Estes In Beasts of the Hill, Mark Neely works in small spaces where the slightest moves have seismic consequences. The acoustics are sensational, and the modest and laconic gestures of the poems (like a grandfather who lifts 'one Midwestern finger from the wheel to say hello') are also vehicles for the flights and fugues of a 'glorious attack.' Neely's lines can be fundamental or extravagant, sober or infused with metaphysical light. Wonder and 'furious desire' are the engines that drive these poems, which shatter distance, space, and time into manifold presences both intimate and strange. Neely has the chops and the voice to sing the blues. --Bruce Smith Mark Neely's insistent, persistent meditations--multiple takes on everything from flights to fences, dirt to dreams, wheels to woods, fields to falls, threads to the dead--add up to nothing less than a mandala of the human spirit. Here is a companion to take you on a walk, 'shoulder over foot, shoulder over foot,' into the prairie, into the unconscious, into the abyss, one staggeringly powerful image at a time. I need this book: 'I have eaten fifty thousand tulips, waiting.' --Robin Behn