The Devotion Field

The experimental and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E influence is clear, yet The Devotion Field offers, in a number of urban elegies, more narrative and personal (though still political) detail than has been Keelan’s habit. Full of cultural and social critique, the poems concern themselves with the artifice of language, the art of being and the art of art, the fragmentation and continuous flux of contemporary life. She employs trademark techniques: stream-of--consciousness, free association and associative leaps, in addition to a new emphasis on melody and musical phrasing.AntiqueShe brought the teapot because it was broken& broken still valuable,A thing not available to her otherwise.On its restored surface a pastoralFlickered once. Too late.She was not honest but she was a poetMending the broken valuable . . .“What absolute nonsense!” cried the Earthworm.“NothingIs ever all right in the end and well you know it.”Poor Earthworm, Ladybug whispered,Loving all that is disasterBellydown breathing with it everafter.“Claudia Keelan’s The Devotion Field fully confirms the promise of her earlier books, especially the recent Utopic. The quotidian world of what seems to be things, ‘dog food and soil,’ ‘dust and bits of paper,’ flows naturally and luminously into the world of ideas, which becomes even more palpable. ‘Into the possibilities of the next page, / Or more nearly, another day.’ The transit, returning us to where we always are, is breathtaking.”—John AshberyClaudia Keelan is the author of three previous prize--winning collections of poetry. She teaches in the MFA and Ph.D. programs at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and is the editor of Interim.