The Devotion Field

“Charged with negative capability, Keelan’s avant-garde collection plays in multiple dimensions….Like a linguistic ethicist—like a mad, social-science hybrid with a knack for transcending—Keelan wonders what worldly results might be achieved by a re-framing, on the level of the pronoun, of our grammatical relationship to the world. Given our sense, given evidence of life on many levels, can we second-and-third-person ourselves? Can we out ourselves toward awareness beyond our singular frames? What kind of relationships are possible when borders are permeable?…Keelan’s de-centered voices proliferate through leaps of metaphor and association, in choral compositions eulogizing the national soul.” —Denver Quarterly “. . .a genuine and not-at-all trite sense of gratitude for the miracles of daily life provides responses, if not answers, to Keelan’s questions, but many post-elections readers will find her inquiries into the larger patterns and parameters of the national soul more pressing.” —Publishers Weekly “. . .notions of plastic language, wit, humor, religious and philosophical considerations underlie all the work in this book. Keelan isn’t scared to make pictures or be simple—there are plenty of striking, careful images here; love poems, too—but neither is she afraid to grapple with ideas and explore the notions of writing and interior life. These poems may be rooted in experience, experiences which ring true, but they are used as stepping stones to something else: that something being poetry rather than stories told in broken lines.” —Stride Magazine “Claudia Keelan’s The Devotion Field fully confirms the promise of her earlier books, especially the recent Utopic. The quotidian world of what seems to be things, “dog food and soil,” “dust and bits of paper,” flows naturally and luminously into the world of ideas, which becomes even more palpable. ‘Into the possibilities of the next page,/ Or more nearly, another day.’ The transit, returning us to where we always are, is breathtaking.” —John Ashbery