On Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love by Keith S. Wilson

As its title suggests, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love by Keith S. Wilson delights in lush meditations on the quiet and occasionally mundane moments in romantic and familial relationships. In this debut collection of poems, the quotidian turns sacred—worthy of song and of study. More often than not these poems employ direct address, as in "Aubade to Collapsed Star":

You bankrupt the sun, underwaterstatue. Dark galaxy of faults, our bed

a garden of the littlest sighsof our waking. Our room, abstract.

[…]

immaterial. My hands confusedfor want of your hands

[…]

… I ought to have married youagainst the ifs of this world, out of flux

with all the dishes and the duston the books, and your late

mornings, each movementI have missed like this, and I, accustomed

to the wall when I awake,the exodus of your laugh, mascara.

Here, Wilson allows a moment of waking to flourish into "a garden," a "Dark galaxy of faults." Yet, true to the tradition of the aubade, the speaker awakens alone at the end. His hands reach for his missing lover. Even the most monotonous, at times antagonizing, details of cohabitation, "the dishes and the dust on the books," are brought into the scene as missed—and therefore valued—objects. Ordinary moments of their coupling glow brighter in their ephemerality.

Packing Fieldnotes with scientific terms such as dark matter and asterism, Wilson creates something both ethereal and grounded. Exploration of these concepts allows the speaker to effectively plumb the depths of his longing.

In a series of couplets irreverently titled "Tercets," the absence of the lover continues to radiate through the speaker's interactions with his father:

love it's only gotten worse my father can't stopsaying your name like a war his nation lost or a miracle

that saved him from an undertow unpromptedyou rise like a body from a lake before dinner

grace has never been more biblical than in the gaspabout your name the quiet

being the inverse of a heartbeat i depended on a seasonfor which there is no dress and i say yeah

[…]

that i remember my love i swallowmy hands taking the place of your hands on the table

Here, the absent lover—or collapsed star—from the envoy is remembered as a "heartbeat" that once supported the speaker's life. Her touch once nourished him. More than just a physical body, this "love" has become a myth that the father cannot unlearn. Unpunctuated, the poem establishes its rhythm with a hexametrical first line and repetitions of "love," both of which create the effect of a plea—or even a prayer.

The collection's variety is a testament to received and made forms, such as the aubade. Even the prose poem "I Find Myself Defending Pigeons" encompasses devices commonly found in verse: anaphora, rhyme, assonance. "The Way I Hold My Hands" reads like a sonnet in length and temperament with a volta around the eighth line that shifts the poem from the speaker's father's childhood to that of his own. Wilson also includes several ekphrastic pieces in the collection—one of which is named after Gustave Caillebotte's Calf's Head and Ox Tongue:

Here stands Minotaur, before the painting            rigid, shaven, his Nike's (amazing—how can he afford Nikes?) pewter blue, impossiblyclean, seen       clearly here in the track light.       His far apart eyes, deep as Sabalan's crater,one earbud in the tepee of his leftear, the other tucked like a secret in his pocket.  Minotaur in name and race

and inclination, here as witness

to the young tongue's fashionable sag.Oil on canvas. Three and one-half pounds      of meat. And dangling, and keeping pace withthe tongue,a pitted head. What once was calf, painted.What once was the truth of a tongue.

[…]

Part man and part bull, the minotaur is cast as an allegory for a biracial man. Assonance and internal rhyme carry us through his description. A parenthetical—"how can...