Four Fields - by Dorinda Wegener (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A finalist for the North American Book Award in Poetry, the Eric Hoffer Poetry Prize, and the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, Dorinda Wegener's Four Fields weaves family traditions and natural landscapes into a stunning tapestry of loss, trauma, growth, and maturity. Metaphor envelops Wegener's rich language, with words becoming "green as forgiveness" and "trepid as love" as she explores complex familial bonds, religious tenets, and human identity. Wegener's work conveys emotional depth through vivid imagery, transforming birds, insects, and flowers into symbols that represent the truths of life. Four Fields invites readers into its winding pages, immersing them in the croft and leaving a lasting impact with each cedar waxwing's cry.

Review Quotes

"You know you are bound to return to a collection when you begin committing lines and images to notebook or memory. Four Fields is such a searing book, haunting in its vocabularies of revelations and withholdings. Here language becomes surgical instrument and arsenal, suture thread and root shovel, tabernacle and apiary, 'a mute weight/inside an asylum of flesh' as well as trigger that sets 'the tongue to toll.' Penned 'with the intention of amendment, with thrift/to thrive penances' and the need of a new 'prayer//in any tongue, ' Wegener's poems enlist memory's 'third eye' to probe and upend violations and filial anguish, and to put 'suffering in order.' This is a first book of singular craft and dazzling reckonings.

- Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Cemetery Ink

"In Four Fields, Dorinda Wegener deftly journeys through spectacular forms of trauma and transcendence. Four Fields pushes the boundaries of what language can do, twisting words until they move in astonishing ways. The poems in this powerful collection stitch together timeless and modern idioms to foreground the horrors and joys of being human, how we are taken apart but also how we put ourselves back together again through language."

- Caroline Hagood, Author of Weird Girls

"In this brilliant and wise debut collection Dorinda Wegener, with a naturalist's eye and a strong sense of connection to both place and family, speaks through one stunning image after another-berry baskets, leaf-litter, barn swallows, wild spicewood, poorly folded proteins, a screwdriver, fire opals. This collection creates 'a lifeline' between the speaker and her family, between the living and the dead, between land and sky, science and theology. Through poems of illness and sometimes trauma, and certainly of loss, Wegener always points us to beauty, mystery, caretaking, and human love in its awkward yet comforting messiness. Her voice is smart and wise, hungry and full, lyrical and unflinchingly respectful of our earth and of our humanity. I am in awe of Four Fields and its call for us to know who we are and to 'see, / these are the signs.'"

- Tara Bray, Author of Small Mothers of Fright