Field as Auditorium

The poems in this collection are superbly responsive to immediate and subtle points of contact with the earth. Cannily aware of the double-edgedness of language-how it can reveal, evoke, but also overlay place and its history-this writer trusts the poetry, going where it leads, even or especially when it attends to small things, ones that seem unimportant. That's where it becomes a resonant instrument, one that vibrates with larger issues as and when it finds the wavelength. Read this collection as a whole and become an inhabitant of this one particular place and the world.

-Philip Gross, Thirteenth Angel (2022), Between the Islands (2020), The Water Table (2009), all from Bloodaxe.

In Field as Auditorium, we are invited to listen to the land as it speaks through the seasons. This collection of poems, elegant in their language and compelling in their forms, carves itself out of the intimate and expansive terrains of the natural world, uncovering the layers of history, human presence, and ecological transformation there. Over and over, the poems beckon us to observe, cherish, and revere the natural world and the truths it holds about our existence. This is a beautiful and moving collection.

-Chris Salerno, The Man Grave (Persea, 2021), Sun & Urn (University of Georgia Press, 2017)

Maura High is more than a field guide speaking of nature. In her poems-the songs, voices, and often unnoticed motions of nature, living and apparently unliving-are deftly represented and revealed. Here is earth at the roots: what might be hidden is revealed, plants that flower and vine are celebrated, and the work of burning and repairing are unified and understood. Enter this Auditorium to be entertained, educated, and more-immersed and delighted by High's astute engagements in her chosen fields.

-Paul Jones, Something Wonderful (2021), Something Necessary (2024), both from Redhawk.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maura High lives in North Carolina. Most of her poems concern this land and its inhabitants, human and other. She has won awards for individual poems and for her chapbooks, and is active in poetry groups and poetry events locally and nationally, as well as in her native Wales. Her work includes three chapbooks, The Garden of Persuasions (Jacar Press), Stone, Water, Time (Lyric Art Publishing), and The Field Index (Bolin Press), and poems in a number of print and online anthologies and magazines, among them The New England Review, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, Panoply, Terrain, Canary, Comstock Review, and The Phare. For a fuller account of her work and interests, see www.maurahigh.com.