Fallow Field:
Poems
The first, full-length collection of poems by award-winning (Nebraska Review Award, Aldrich Emerging Poets Award) poet Scott Edward Anderson, Fallow Field spans twenty-five years of his writing, including individual poems that have appeared in such publications as the American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Anon, The Cortland Review, CrossConnect, Many Mountains Moving, and Terrain, among other publications.
Anderson brings to life on the page his deep engagement with the natural world -- and our human relationship with each other and our impact on the Earth -- in poetry that is both accessible and intellectually stimulating. With an acute attention to craft and a clarity of language, Anderson offers a book of poems that demonstrates the precision and range of his poetic vision.
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Praise for Fallow Field
“Scott Edward Anderson's poems honor the reality that the things of the world – rye grass, fall warblers, ravens, owls, ‘Sargassum drifting/ in a pelagic wave,’ lovers and sourdough bread – speak to and for our innerness. Here the sense of place is not simply a matter of geography, but of feeling one's way into that sense of becoming that makes one's path clear. The book's fourth section is comprised of poems that beautifully embrace the very human need to join the inner and outer, a territory defined, as the poem titles suggest, by ‘Becoming,’ ‘Shapeshifting,’ ‘Cultivating,’ ‘Mapping,’ and ‘Healing.’ Guided since childhood, as the book's closing long poem relates, by nature's teaching, Anderson is devoted to finding the words for what it means to dwell mindfully among others on the wounded earth.”
— Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Rope: Poems
“Fallow Field is a wonderful read. I love the range and beauty of it, how motifs persist from poem to poem, like the moon rising and setting. How simply Anderson says unsimple things.”
— John Glenday, author of Grain: Poems
"I was impressed by Anderson’s engagement with nature -- especially the way in which his lyrical lines sketch the profound relationship between humans and their environment."
— Jonathan Galassi, author of Left-handed: Poems
“Fallow Field is a richly gifted collection of perceptive poems on the world’s directions and dangers, legacies and tributes. It’s a treasure!”
— Colette Inez, author of Horseplay: Poems
“The poems in Fallow Field are beautiful, intimate, and engage profoundly with ecocriticism and our fragile earth.”
— Denise Duhamel, author of Blowout
“Scott Edward Anderson’s wonderful new collection of poetry, Fallow Field, [is] so alive with song birds, deer, and remote latitudes that I’m convinced Anderson is as in-tune with the romantic notion as any poet writing today.”
— Richard Fenwick, review on ruiningsterner.com
"When I read the poems of Scott Edward Anderson’s Fallow Field, I envision a Romantic poet standing on the bridge between William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg. If that sounds odd, let me explain. A Romantic influence reveals itself as the pulse of Anderson’s Fallow Field. But American poets, American poetry, from the Modern era up to the Beats, show up in lesser but sundry ways throughout the work. And not just American poets, as various quotes (from Pessoa, Coelho, and others) throughout the work show Anderson is not limited to the Romantics, American poets, either or both."
— Christopher Cadra, review in basalt
"It’s easy to like these poems. They read easily and well. They are about familiar things. And yet they do what good poetry should do, and that’s to provide a different view, an unexpected perspective, taking the familiar and bathing it in unfamiliar shades and colors.”
— Glynn Young, review in tweetspeak