Books November 2006
A review of “Field Knowledge” by Morri Creech.
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...
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