Field Music audiobook

thank you so much to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC! this book was so incredibly beautiful. i loved the approach to setting. each poem set up a gorgeous landscape that intertwined between rural and urban life and built out a universal family. while it didn’t feel like every single poem was connected, i never found myself disliking the flow; it continued on smoothly and effectively. loved this collection!

The most beautiful book. I can't recommend it more highly. Lyric, sensual, incisive, and so moving. Also kinda like farm sexy.

What a gorgeous, lush collection. Each poem moves like a breeze and there were so many lines that made me pause and stare out the window. Hall's debut is at once aching and sexy, grieving and quiet. I love the way Hall builds her landscapes, how quick flashes of image, like a robin's egg, act as startling anchors, how certain lines drop to wet the heads of the lines beneath them.In the park by the falls, I watched a man / eating. Between his legs / his dog waited for a scrap. To feed is to care, / not to crave, or carve.What a stunning book. I can't wait to read and re-read it again and again. Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this.

Poetry is a very personal experience and what resonates with one might not ring true with another. Hall explores life in rural Vermont in this accomplished collection- although much of the imagery holds true for farm life anywhere. Put this at bedside and read one each night to fully appreciate the language and keep it fresh. Or, alternately, read the whole thing in a gulp and then go back to savor each poem a second time. Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC.

This poetry collection was uniquely filled with rural tension, using farm-like metaphors in a way I've never heard done so lyrically, with so much hunger. While the jarring shifts between lines took time to get used to, the deeper darker elements of the pieces shone through. "Home / is where the mail goes," the narrator says in "Walking in Reverse," and we can relate. "Practice Test for Insatiable Loneliness" is a multiple choice test with no answer key. There is a simplicity in how harsh and violent bodies are described, again mirroring the mentality of farm life. I got a bit lost in the abstract jumbling of pieces like "Contrition," but appreciated the idea of confusion, embraced the uncertainty of what I was supposed to understand.. "On Art" and "Return" were definitely favorites in the collection because of the connections with past artists combined with a shared longing. The important people in these stories are nameless and yet they make crucial decisions, life-altering mistakes over and over. This allows us to seep into the stories and make the characters our man we love, our mother, our baby girl. Fullness, emptiness, everything between the two - these lines ache along this chasm.

From my review for Seven Days:https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/b...Right out of the gate, Alexandria Hall's astonishing debut Field Music, winner of the $10,000 National Poetry Series, announces itself as a whole new kind of Vermont poetry. "Dad says he can sing like a Kawasaki. He says / he's got some good idears," Hall's narrator tells us in the title poem. A few lines later: "I know about sex. It's a not a cardinal / flying into the wrong window." The poem ends: "Dad hit / Grandpa till the state troopers strobed / the kitchen, staining my sweater. Grandma says / creek like crick and I wait for the violins. // If you keep kicking somebody, music / will come out eventually."Hall's song is an unflinching and exquisitely lyrical depiction of growing up in working-class, rural Vermont. Absent are the pastoral clichés that have calcified over the past half-century, the flatlander gaze, the cardinal bearing a pat metaphor in its beak. Instead, Hall shows us a contemporary Vermont that's instantly recognizable to those who've grown up here: going muddin', virginity lost in cornfields, the kick of a .22, ticks, fertilizer runoff, and spitting dip.These images come alive in part because of Hall's deft code-switching between poetic diction and rural Vermont syntax. "On Beauty," a prose poem, begins: "He run out of propane and the cold licked the trailer like a dog with a hurt paw. Pa, my brother would have called him, if I'd had a brother, if I'd a been him, had he been at all." Later on, this same voice splices Rainer Maria Rilke quotes with pop-music lyrics, all while flitting in and out of her grandmother's idiom and her own.Hall uses startlingly fresh language to convey a complex range of emotions that travel far beyond the borders of a small town. Illnesses and accidents haunt the book, as do yearning, vulnerability and self-discovery. At one point the narrator admits, "I left home like a tick / leaves the tall grass"; several poems travel to Spain, Peru, Germany, and Brooklyn.In "Travel Narrative" Hall writes, "Remember I wanted to go home, / which was a shadow, so I didn't." This narrator constantly circles back, searching for more precise means of expression. Often it is cryptic, but gorgeously so: "There was too much moon over the night in Middlebury / so I put a man's face in front of it, and then I loved / that man."Sometimes Hall's search manifests in creating whole new forms, as in "Practice Test for Insatiable Loneliness" (one of several superbly original titles, along with "I Contain Myself Needfully" and "Something Important Put Clumsily Away"). Written in the form of an SAT exam, it begins:1. Absencea) makes the heart grow in vines up the latticework.b) makes dinner and leaves the dishes.c) makes change like the man at the laundromat, carefully on the wooden counter.d) makes love cruelly.Though never heavy-handed, certain poems in Field Music are acutely aware of class: "I used to hear it as, making ends meat." Halfway through the book, Hall's narrator says, "At the lake house I was strange, surrounded / by nice things, trying on fancy clothes or posing / nude before the grand bay windows." When she says, "Home is where the mail goes," it means something very different from the problems of owning two or three houses. These moments of class perspective heighten everything that surrounds them, adding an element of authenticity that's refreshingly free of masculine asceticism.Hall grew up in Addison County. A first-generation college student, she studied with Major Jackson at the University of Vermont. Music scene cognoscenti will likely remember her not as a poet but as "Burlington's queen of woozy soul," as this paper put it in a 2010 feature, performing her original electronic music as tooth ache. and later as Beth Head. Father/Daughter Records released a 7-inch vinyl of her music, and Hall even filmed a music video at the legendary Shenanigans bowling alley/strip club in White River Junction. For now, literature seems to be winning out in vying for Hall's creative energy. After UVM, she won a lucrative Beinecke Scholarship to attend New York University's master's program in poetry. Currently, she's pursuing a PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.In Hall's closing piece, "People Fall All the Time," the strands of pain and intimacy that weave throughout the book are braided together, transmitting a vernacular music. The final stanza ends, "He said Manual labor. He said The fall / as something you can take. He suffered / a break in a lonely way. Lo hello high hay, / the words in the marrow, the sow and the mare, Oh— / what stays are the song and the crash / of the tractor, the trash compactor, the machines / full of love and the fields full of breaking, / the fields where the light slips out."In Field Music, a meteoric young writer shrugs off decades of stale narrative tradition and subject matter. In its place come dazzling lyricism and innovation, and a glimpse of Vermont that has long deserved to have its story told in its own voice.

This is a book of poems, and an excellent one. I have never been to Vermont, but after reading Hall's book I believe I have. Her lyrics take me there. Her use of language is gorgeous. Cannot recommend enough.

Wonderful new poet. Lyrical, funny, poignant and sad. As adept as deploying the aesthetic of a farm tractor as the surprise at a father secreting a tomato plant where a young daughter had planted a stone the night before.

HushMy Mother the AstronomerAfter Hearing of My Father's IllnessDirt SongTouch Comes Through MeSomething Important Put Clumsily Away

A great collection of intelligent and thoughtful poems open to any lover of poetry. I think this is the poet's first book and it's a good one.

I have never been so delighted to see the word shit in a poem, and never so awed by explainations of love and loss

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This is a uniquely wonderful collection of poetry. I've only just started reading poetry about nature and this was a great one that connects to the rural American (farm) experience. Some of the poems felt a little disconnected but I don't believe it took away from this collection at all.

https://therumpus.net/2020/12/field-m...