The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems

by Marilyn Nelson

Overview

In The Fields of Praise, Marilyn Nelson claims as subjects the life of the spirit, the vicissitudes of love, and the African American experience and arranges them as white pebbles marking our common journey toward a “monstrous love / that wants to make the world right.”

Nelson is a poet of stunning power, able to bring alive the most rarified and subtle of experiences. A slave destined to become a minister preaches sermons of heartrending eloquence and wisdom to a mule. An old woman scrubbing over a washtub receives a personal revelation of what Emancipation means: “So this is freedom: the peace of hours like these.” Memories of the heroism of the Tuskegee Airmen in the face of aerial combat abroad and virulent racism at home bring a speaker to the sudden awareness of herself as the daughter “of a thousand proud fathers.”

Whether evoking spiritual longing or a return to the wedding at Cana, Nelson renders the interior landscape of all her speakers with absolute precision. This is a beautiful collection indeed, and readers will come away from The Fields of Praise with a reawakened appreciation for life’s minor miracles, one of them being the power of the word.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807121757
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	05/01/1997
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Marilyn Nelson’s other poetry titles include Magnificat, Mama’s Promises, and The Homeplace—a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of the Annisfield-Wolf Award, she is professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and a member of the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

Editorial Reviews

Embracing themes of motherhood and marriage, racism and religion, Nelson recombines accomplished works from earlier volumes (The Homeplace; Magnificat) with new poems. In one run-on sentence the narrator of "Bali Hai Calls Mama" recalls a Saturday afternoon in which, "I was putting away the groceries/ I'd spent the morning buying" and "the baby was screaming/and I dropped the bag of cake flour..." when suddenly through the window comes "the cry of wild geese." Section II offers poems about her childhood. "How I Discovered Poetry" (listening to a teacher read) and "Sisters," with schoolgirls fist fighting at a bus stop, mix with resonant paeans to her parents. Strongest is Section III; its poems, grappling with evil and filled with biblical and philosophical references, demonstrate a luminous power. Included are a series of parables about the holy figure, Abba Jacob, whose teachings are delivered in taut, colloquial verse: in one, after he gives up in his fight with an angel, "she took his hand in hers/ and put her arm around his neck./ Then he heard the music." The final section, with its sequences on love and forgiveness, closes with the story of a racist incident which ends with a wholly unexpected apology, a "minor miracle" in the life that we must navigate together, as Nelson persuasively reminds us in this stirring assemblage of poems. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"....Te Fields of Praise is a mid-career selectison from four earlier books, combined with new work. Rather than arrange the poems chronologically, Nelson has chosen to order them thematically: roughly, the maternal and paternal principles; a multi-generational African American family history; spiritual parables; meditations on the nature of good and evil. Still, the book traces a thematic and formal development, as the poet's world-view opens out through her chosen subjects...." The Women's Review of Books

Marilyn Hacker