Fields of Praise

In The Fields of Praise, Marilyn Nelson claims as subjects the life of the spirit, the vicissitudes of love, and the African American experience and arranges them as white pebbles marking our common journey toward a ""monstrous love / that wants to make the world right.""Nelson is a poet of stunning power, able to bring alive the most rarified and subtle of experiences. A slave destined to become a minister preaches sermons of heartrending eloquence and wisdom to a mule. An old woman scrubbing over a washtub receives a personal revelation of what Emancipation means: ""So this is freedom: the peace of hours like these."" Memories of the heroism of the Tuskegee Airmen in the face of aerial combat abroad and virulent racism at home bring a speaker to the sudden awareness of herself as the daughter ""of a thousand proud fathers.""Whether evoking spiritual longing or a return to the wedding at Cana, Nelson renders the interior landscape of all her speakers with absolute precision. This is a beautiful collection indeed, and readers will come away from The Fields of Praise with a reawakened appreciation for life's minor miracles, one of them being the power of the word.

"Rooted in the basic soil of redemptive imagination, the voices in Nelson's poems seek a lyrical foothold in our daily lives. Her words teach us how to praise ourselves by praising each other."-Yusef Komunyakaa Praise for the poetry of Marilyn Nelson "Nelson re-creates vanished worlds of African American history, tracing her family's odyssey from slavery times to the establishment of a 'homeplace' in Oklahoma. . . . [She] joins thematic strains from her five previous collections in an almost seamless unity. Concerns with family and origin interlock perfectly with an encompassing meditation on morality and religion. . . . The poems of The Fields of Praise will stick in the reader's memory a long time."-Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Nelson has made something new and, at the same time, demonstrated that the old makes a strong base on which to build. . . . In tone, this book is matter-of-factly stoical, but it will not stand for injustice. . . . It believes, in the end, in the 'power of words.'"-Georgia Review "Poignant, powerful, and disquieting by turns, this varied collection . . . contains much memorable food for reflection."-Christianity and Literature "'Double vision' is a strength of Nelson's work in more than a cultural context: it grounds her understanding of the mutual sources of erotic and spiritual longing, of the ways the universe reveals its workings in quotidian perceptions."-Women's Review of Books

Marilyn Nelson's other poetry titles include Magnificat, Mama's Promises, and The Homeplace--a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of the Annisfield-Wolf Award, she is professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and a member of the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.