Swallow: Poems (Bakeless Prize) [Paperback]

Miranda Field (Author)

Book Description

Series: Bakeless Prize | Publication Date: August 15, 2002

From the microcosmic wilderness of an overgrown back yard to the cool, glassed-in exhibits in a natural history museum, Swallow swoops and darts, tangling the lines we draw between the wild and the cultivated. In her debut collection, Miranda Field explores a world composed equally of shadow and substance, filled not just with beauty but also with a kind of savage experience. But Swallow is more than a crisscrossing of boundaries. It is an imperative, a dare: Go ahead, do as Eve did; let hunger take you wherever it will.
According to James Longenbach, these poems are "too beautifully made to idealize freedom, too much in love with vicissitude to idealize beauty. Read these poems, enter them, and be hungry forever."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Writer-in-residence at the Teachers and Writers collaborative in New York City, North London-born-and-raised Miranda Field won the Discovery/The Nation award, and arrives here with the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference Bakeless Prize-winning Swallow. Overflying the "Subway," "Crime Scenes," a D rer "Field Hare," "Tumultuous Stillness," the "Museum of Natural History" and many other sites and singularities, Field gets a bird's-eye panorama of the world, "an always-climbing caller, always calling something far-off closer."
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Miranda Field was born and raised in London. A winner of the Discovery/The Nation Award and a teaching fellow at the 2002 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, she holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College. She is currently a writer in residence at the Teachers & Writers Collaborative and lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; None edition (August 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618189300
• ISBN-13: 978-0618189304
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #949,641 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delicious darkness, October 23, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Swallow: Poems (Bakeless Prize) (Paperback)

This may be a first book, but I agree with Mebdh McGuckian who calls it, "Fully fledged," and the San Francisco Chronicle that calls it "A long step toward an enduring contribution." It has a keen sense of how even (or is that, "especially") children know what Emily Dickinson knows, that the tighter the enclosure (yard, kitchen, house) the wilder and more savage the ecstasy. "A restless, rigorous transcription of the senses," says Linda Gregerson, "including the sense we call intellect." Yes.