Backlist: A Happening

Backlist: A Happening Review Incarnate: Story Material Thalia Field New Directions http://www.ndpublishing.com 126 pages; paperback, $15.95 Thalia Field's Incarnate: Story Material is a book of poetry. . .or so the back cover says. As such, readers might surmise that the fourteen pieces contained in this book are poems. Yet one needs to be careful when assessing Field's work. The idea that what is contained in Incarnate is a series of safe lines of free verse is a gross misconception. Challenging preconceptions ofwhatpoetry and ultimately language can do, Incarnate is a book that celebrates possibility and eternal becoming, with a hint of mystery. Is this book the "incarnation" implicit in its title? Or is it, as the title also seems to imply, material for a story yet to be written? If you've been following the poetries ofthe past fiftyyears, thenyou may have guessed that Incarnate is decidedly both/and. Definitions evolve throughoutthisbook. Subjects turn intoother, slightly different subjects, at once asking and begging a key question: what might these subjects become? Take this excerpt from "Watermoon": if the universe biases in favor of matter collides with asymmetric results indicating after the collision of antimatter with the rest how empty space illuminates things prevailing before falling apart Truth be told, the work in Field's Incarnation never does fall apart. On the contrary, for 126 pages the reader is suspended in a perpetual state of "things prevailing before." But if, instead of falling apart, these pieces retain theirgraceful shape, then whatthey might "prevail[] before," exactly, we can't be certain. One gets the impression that, rather than presenting the reader with her ideas about a subject, Field grants these pieces sufficient conceptual space for the ideas themselves to develop. The subjects—lists, Internet searches, churches, prison, populations, Alaska, dialogue —reside in an ideational flux, the idea of which is itself in flux. This quality of perpetual becoming can be seen in Field's poem "Sweat": Mud made the mountains shaky and still when she gazed out the character-door at the clearing, mud, and the mountain back behind, how old and how glass she is. That is behind her the mountain as usual, but before her the glass door and mud and no memory. It is here, deep in the folds of meaning-making and contextualization, that Field makes room for the development of character and characters themselves. Field's "she" is not the idyllic, static representation of an observer, but rather the continuously morphing "she" of a living participant. The very fact of "her" existence changes with the shifting of the human eye andthe newly informedbrain. Field's "she," then, like the rest ofthe work in Incarnate, is not suffocated and lifeless, but rather furnished with the requisite space to stretch. And when "she" stretches, the world is of course affected, much as we are all constantly affecting one another. Challengingpreconceptions ofwhatpoetry and ultimately language can do, Incarnate celebrates possibility and eternal becoming. If Incarnate is a book of texts becoming, it is also a book of texts having been created. Field's language has a quality at once nuanced and base. Not quite found poetry, not quite bricolage, Field's "Feeling into Motion," for instance, is a testament to her ability both to provoke and to puncture the membrane surrounding the use ofofficial language in the acquisition ofAlaska: 1960's: eight major surveys testing the viability of getting roads in or out of Juneau. From anywhere anywhere. Tests are still done today, with engineers and surveyors conjuring words for land connection: artery, umbilical .... Too bad: so many reasons. Now we think we are realistic. Detailfrom cover "Feeling into Motion" is a piece that uses language material to facilitate a reinvestigation. It is a poem founded on dates, directions, and place names—the markers of a corresponding history. The hitherto glossed-over circumstances ofAlaska's inclusion into the United States proves an opportunity for Field to reframe standard high school textbook history. Where "Feeling into Motion" is based on history already made, the poem "Autocartography" embraces the act of making things in the present. Field asks (tells?) us (herself?) to "Make a Laundry List ofThis...