Fältarbeten i gult och grönt

  Dags för ytterligare ett fältarbete i den grönskande lyrikens tjänst. Antologin är densamma som förra veckan, "The Echoing Green".

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  När Angela Shaw debuterade med boken The beginning of the fields (2009), fick hon strålande kritik. Här citeras ett par komentarer:

Junot Diaz has said, “I’ve read nothing better in the field these last ten years. Angela Shaw is simply furiously miraculous.”

"Angela Shaw’s new book is likely to be greeted as one of the most powerful debuts of this decade. Both muscular and delicate, these poems plunge a reader back into the sensory world, shaken and exhilarated." Tupelo Press

   Diktexemplet ur Echoing green är hämtat från den sensationellt starka debutboken.

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Children in a field, by Angela Shaw (f. 1967)
(First published in The beginning of the fields. North Adams, MA : Tupelo Press, 2009.)

They don’t wade in so much as they are taken.
Deep in the day, in the deep of the field,
every current in the grasses whispers hurry
hurry, every yellow spreads its perfume
like a rumor, impelling them further on.
It is the way of girls.  It is the sway
of their dresses in the summer trance-
light, their bare calves already far-gone
in green.  What songs will they follow?
Whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm
or harm the border promises, whatever
calm.  Let them go.  Let them go traceless 
through the high grass and into the willow-
blur, traceless across the lean blue glint
of the river, to the long dark bodies
of the conifers, and over the welcoming
threshold of nightfall.

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  Förra året nominerade jag Alice Oswald till titeln Årets Poet. Mycket på grund av den kritikerrosade boken Falling awake (2016). Därefter har jag stött på, och tyckt om, flera andra dikter av henne. Nu senast ur antologin från Everyman's Library. 

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The Glade, Dartington Hall Gardens

Field, by Alice Oswald (f. 1966)
(From The echoing green : poems of fields, meadows, and grasses. Edited by Cecily Parks. New York : Everyman's Library, 2016.)

Easternight, the mind’s midwinter

I stood in the big field at the back of the house
at the centre of all visible darkness

a brick of earth, a block of sky,
there lay the world, wedged
between its premise and its conclusion

some star let go a small sound on a thread.

almost midnight - I could feel the earth’s
soaking darkness squeeze and fill its darkness
everything spinning into the spasm of midnight

and for a moment, this high field unhorizoned
hung upon nothing, barking for its owner

burial, widowed, moonless, seeping

docks, grass, small windflowers, weepholes, wires.

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  Joanna Klink är en amerikansk poet. Hon föddes i Iowa City, Iowa. Hon tog en M.F.A. i poesi från Iowa Writers Workshop och en Ph.D. i humaniora från Johns Hopkins University. Hon har varit medlem i poesifakulteten vid University of Montana sedan hösten 2001. Källa: Wikipedia

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(From "Three bewildered landscapes", by Joanna Klink. First published in Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy. Penguin 2015.)

STARS, SCATTERSTILL. Constellations of people and quiet. 

Those nights when nothing catches, nothing also is artless. 

I walked for hours in those forests, my legs a canvas of scratches,

trading on the old hopes — we were meant to be lost. But being lost

means not knowing what it means. Inside the meadow is the grass,

rich with darkness. Inside the grass is the wish to be rooted, inside the rain

the wish to dissolve. What you think you live for you may not live for. 

One star goes out. One breath lifts inside a crow inside a field.