Field Light - Owen Lewis

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Résumé :
Field Light, written as an extended, multi-sectioned poem that moves in and out of prose, is a personal and historical exploration of the Berkshires through poetry and prose. Physician-poet Owen Lewis becomes a figure in his own epic as he learns to see himself and the abounding history that lives in the towns of western Massachusetts. From the writers Hawthorne, Melville, nearby Stanley Kunitz, Chris Gilbert and others, to artists Daniel Chester French, his daughter Peggy Cresson and Norman Rockwell, from the young lawyer Theodor Sedgwick who undertook a trial in 1781 to free Elizabeth Mumbet ending slavery in Massachusetts, to civil rights champion W.E.B. Du Bois, to Arlo Guthrie, to physician Austen Riggs and his psychiatric hospital, to Gertrude Smith and the founding of Tanglewood, Field Light investigates layered histories to create a compelling cultural, political and social narrative, with its cycles of privilege and racism, that continues to unfold. It is the story of finding one's voice amid many voices, and the importance of the community of voices. SAMPLE: (1991) In rain, I first saw the house, shingled in Dormouse gray. Through streaked windows of wavering glass its fields wild, impenetrable November weather raising a dog's musty history-scent, others' histories, not a New York smell inside. (Underfoot, a wall-to-wall patch- work of multi-colored carpet remnants covering up the old chestnut floors, the toddlers each chose a carpet square as home-base.) I heard the agent say- No ghosts!-but overhead quick-clicking ceiling feet scamper the attic, red squirrels and gray racing the dark. From the eaves flying-squirrels jumping into the mist....

Biographie:
Owen Lewis is the author of two prior collections of poetry, Marriage Map and Sometimes Full of Daylight (2017 and 2013 from Dos Madres Press), and two chapbooks. best man received the 2016 Jean Pendrick Chapbook Prize (The New England Poetry Club). Recent honors include 2018 Runner-up, Wigtown Poetry Competition (Scotland)...

Sommaire:
Owen Lewis is the author of four collections of poetry and three chapbooks. Honors include the 2024 E.E.Cummings Prize, the 2023 Guernsey International Poetry Prize, the 2023 Rumi Prize for Poetry, the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. At Columbia University he is Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and teaches Narrative Medicine....