The New Criterion

Morri Creech
Field Knowledge,
Waywsier Press, 73 pages, $15.95

reviewed by Callie Siskel

Winner of the first annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, judged by Hecht’s literary executor, J. D. McClatchy, Morri Creech’s Field Knowledge has set the bar high for future aspirants. Creech’s cadence and content recall the forms Hecht used to describe an unraveling world. In a book centered on the pastoral, Creech weaves form into the delicate description of raw, Southern landscapes. He relishes the textured fields of his childhood and the layered histories that the land evokes.

Creech spends much of the book unearthing these stories—many of them memories of his grandfather—but, over time, they seem to take a backseat to the process of recovery itself. In the title poem, “Field Knowledge,” Creech lifts, layer by layer, time’s influence on the summer soil: “as if you could prize from weeds and loam one immaculate/ hour, one orient pearl buried at the damp root, and lift it clear/ of the years of corn stalks, furrows, hay rakes freckled with scat—.” The fourth, and last, trochee, in a list that serves to relay the weight of the waste, “freckled” is the perfect word to describe Creech’s memories—sun-worn and spotted.

In the opening poem, “Engine Work: Variations,” Creech remembers his grandfather’s yard; he recalls “stripped engines” and “ripe fruit.” The poem begins with a sense of certainty—“June morning. Sunlight flashes through the pines”—but soon his stanzas deliver doubt: “Or else it’s late—September—.” Creech is uncertain: not only how to repossess the memory of his grandfather, but also whether poetry is capable of such an undertaking. In the third stanza, after lines of rich description, he addresses the inaccuracy of his narrative. He concedes: “Language, too, seems wrong,/ though it’s all I have. Grandfather. Scuppernong.”

While Creech’s poetry also explores mythology and science, his personal poems (such as the two quoted here) make Creech’s doubts beautiful, memorable, and poignant. He makes the reader question his own past and the facility with which it can be restored.