Andrew Grace

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Biographical note:  Andrew Grace was born in 1978 in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where his family has farmed for several generations. He studied English literature at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he currently resides. His poems have appeared in several journals and he is the winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857455
ISBN-10:  1876857455
ISBN-13:  9781876857455
Author:  Andrew Grace
Title:  A Belonging Field
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Nov-02
Extent:  108pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  162 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  

Table of contents:
I. Book of the Rising Field
Country As …
On Finding a Marijuana Plant in the Garden
Hail
Book of the Rising Field
A Belonging Field
Moth, Boredom, after Planting
Locusts
Harvest
Conceptual Shadeland
Livestock
Darkness
The Flight of the Great Owl
A Chicken Coop Falls in December
Buzzard Song
II. The Minutiae of Passage
Gnats
Cicadas
Flies
Frogs
III. Dispatches from an Eroding Season
The Seeds of Winter in Summer
Winter Wars
Adaptability
Dispatch, Minnesota
Dispatch, 4th of July
Dispatch, October
IV. Fault
Interlude
Cartography
Morning with Twenty-Eights
Fault
Crow Call
The Busselton Jetty
The Pinnacles
Economies of Space
Bower Birds: Adam & Eve
The Nightmare
V. Single Hours
Light (A Personal History)
Flamenco Scratches
Prolonging the Inevitable
Diary of the Oldest Man in Knox County
Bean Walking, Some Lessons
Boils
Without Power
Firstborn
Thornburn Park Inventory, 1987
Fire-Breathing in the Circus of Sorrow
Five Hauntings

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Excerpt from book:  

Harvest

October full of dust, floating dimly then falling,
the sun burnished garish & whiskey.

Its light seeped like dye into the cracked ground.

Children softly erupted as their fathers sat in tractors,
pulling a curtain closed.

I was a child, among the rubble,

silos spilling bricks from the top down,
cold barns filled with mice,

pickup trucks half-crushed and abandoned: convicts
all banished to the same unfinished country.

The corn outgrew us, clogging our horizons
until all we could see was our small box of sky.

My father would come home so covered with dust
he looked like a scarecrow,

his eyes colored hollow with black marker.
Staring contests to pass the time, my brother & I,

tears running down our cheeks, mother walking in
& asking what’s wrong?

I learned about disappearing

as the combine left its trail of crop-dust,
a blizzard of absence

billowing into the remaining stalks;
each row of corn was a collapsing wall to a museum

of emptiness. I have always felt

that I have been spared somehow. At night,
we snuck out into the freshly shorn fields

to make sure our neighbors were still there,
house cloaked for months by the climbing plants. We would see

the neighbor children had escaped with us, pale,
desperately chasing after themselves

across their moon-filled yard. We would send them
messages in code with our flashlights, saying

From over here, you look like ghosts

Review quote:  Andy Grace’s poems pick up and turn over everything you missed the first time around. Nothing escapes his notice – it’s as if he is tuned in to every frequency at once. The poems are beautifully textured, delicate and yet disturbing – an unforgettable world of gnats, flies and locusts, “whirring ocean of motes and spores”, apprehended and remade with a facility and confidence rare in a new poet.

Tracy Ryan