Susan McCaslin
Field Play
Susan McCaslin’s Field Play unfolds in four interrelated sections: Kith & Kin Fields, Gaia Fields, War Fields, and Cosmic Fields. Kith & Kin Fields explores childhood relations to family and friends. Gaia Fields examines our primal conjoining with Planet Earth and particularly our relationship with other life forms and species. War Fields addresses the early stages of the war in Ukraine and the darkness of war. Cosmic Fields marvels at how all four fields are deeply interconnected aspects of one diverse but unified field of life and consciousness. Having glimpses of the mysteries of unknowing opens us to wonder and participation in the creative processes of the ecosystem. The book’s last poem “Poesia” holds the paradox of silence and words (song, musicality) being contraries rather than opposites: “an entering into mystery/ the zone of the unspeakable/ that desires to be spoken.
The cover image on Susan McCaslin's latest poetry collection, Field Play, appropriately depicts the 12th century mystic, Hildegard of Bingen receiving a vision of the universe as deeply interconnected. McCaslin's visionary poetry: playful, eloquent, erudite, elegiac, engaged and innovative, masterfully addresses four fields: Kith & Kin Fields, Gaia Fields, Warfields, and Cosmic Fields. Through current planetary and political crises, McCaslin's spiritual devotion and love of humanity triumph. McCaslin invites the reader to see with the loving lens of a spiritual seer, her poetry the perfect vehicle to effect this sojourn to the marvellous, the unexpected. In the last poem, “Poesia,” she concludes that poetry is “an entering into mystery, the zone of the unspeakable that deserves to be spoken.”
Katerina Vaughan Fretwell, author of
Familiar and Forgiveness and Holy in My Nature
In Field Play, Susan McCaslin teases out the multifoliate forms of love that surround us. This body-book breathes within a compression of kin and kith, a conversational openness to everyday encounters, and a deep-rooted curiosity for Gaia and all her creaturely expressions. Within all these riches, these poems acknowledge the ravages of war and the need to maintain hope and peaceful resistance. Rather unassumingly, this is sacred ecopoetics as “heartwork,” “aroma of starshine” and “a luminous feast.”
Kevin Spenst, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space
What a lovely crystalline lyricism Susan McCaslin pours forth in her poems. In her new collection, what strikes me is how she explores spirituality and the deep beauty of the natural world while not failing to attend to the nightmare of armed conflict in the world, achieving lines in which she tells us that “Despite the hells / occasionally the heart rests / soaking in greening power / intuiting that somehow love / deeper than tears / rises endlessly in sunflowers and galaxies / in the stenciled wing of a monarch butterfly / communing with lupins and lilacs.” Field Play is a treasure!
Svetlana Ischenko, author of Nucleus
ISBN 978-1-77171-570-6
Poetry
120 pages
6x9
$26.95
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