Overview

"Once in a while, a poetry collection arrives that feels like a companion. The latest of these rare arrivals is Timothy Geiger's In a Field of Hallowed Be, which, like its title, combines traditions of prayer and calendar with wild, earthly inventions, from the ecstatic to the elegiac. Solitary agrarian meditations merge with memories of a youth roving towards ""the milkweed of the west pasture, / where I am asking this field to show me how to live."" Part Wendell Berry and part Shane McGowan, Geiger's latest collection pulls us through scapes of land and garlic and thought. It may be that there are many ways to die and few to live; this book is written by those latter paths, littered with human longing, hungry hogs, and the many names of birds, meadowgrass, and illumination. -Katie Hartsock, Wolf Trees"

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9781947896772

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Reviews

"The great naturalist Aldo Leopold once wrote: "". . . there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all,"" which is precisely the music Timothy Geiger both hears and gives us in a voice that ""whispers like sleet / every insomniac night."" This is a kind of Wordsworthian world where the poet is always looking back in order to look ahead, who listens to the songs of the many birds that populate the poems, not simply for their heard song, but for their unheard messages. Ranging from early childhood memories of family and friends, school and church, sometimes elegiac, sometimes celebratory, these poems quickly expand to an Emersonian expanse. Like ""the starlings- / their incomprehensible psalms of the body / transfigure into the body they become."" There is no greater gift a poet can bring us and like the poet here, ""I'm stalled before something wonderful glowing."" -Richard Jackson, The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems Timothy Geiger's fourth collection brings us to the field. As we follow his speaker, we learn the mixture of ritual and devotion necessary to tend the field, and we benefit from solitary ruminations on the dodged peril of earlier years and sobering speculations on the future. Forgiveness is constant. Marveling at the people and the years he survived leading to the field, the speaker states, ""I am asking this field to show me how to live."" While witnessing daily the natural and seemingly fragile course of life on that field, he anticipates that eventually ""the last light you'll see / will burn the brightest you've ever known / till something else / takes over in a fiery ring of glory, / or nothing else."" We understand Geiger realizes it is his own miracle to have arrived at the field and an honor to be able to reflect on a life. -Dustin Pearson, A Season in Hell with Rimbaud"

Author Information

Timothy Geiger is the author of three previous full-length poetry collections: Weatherbox, winner of the 2019 Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize from Cloudbank Books; The Curse of Pheromones (Main Street Rag); and Blue Light Factory (Spoon River Poetry Press). He is also the author of ten chapbooks, most recently Holler (APoGee Press). His poems have been included in the anthologies American Poetry: Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press), Place of Passage (Storyline Press), and A Fine Excess: Contemporary Writers at Play (Sarabande Books). His honors include a Pushcart Prize XVII; a Holt, Rinehart and Winston Award in Literature; and many state and local grants from Alabama, Minnesota, and Ohio. He is the proprietor of Aureole Press, a letter-press imprint producing chapbooks of contemporary poetry at the University of Toledo, where he teaches creative writing, poetry, and book arts. He lives on a small farm in Swanton, Ohio, with his wife and all their animals.

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