The Devotion Field
Claudia Keelan
2005 PEN Center USA Award in Poetry Finalist
This lively fourth collection should please Keelan’s fans and earn her new ones. The experimental and L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E influence is clear, yet The Devotion Field offers, in a number of urban elegies, more narrative and personal (though still political) detail than has been Keelan’s habit. Full of cultural and social critique, the poems concern themselves with the artifice of language, the art of being and the art of art, and the fragmentation and continuous flux of contemporary life. She employs trademark techniques: stream-of-consciousness, free association, and associative leaps, in addition to a new emphasis on melody and musical phrasing. Turn up the volume and bathe your ears!
"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
about the author
Claudia Keelan is the author of four collections of poetry, including Refinery, which won the Cleveland State University Poetry Prize, The Secularist, a winner in the 1997 Contemporary
Poetry Series from the University of Georgia Press, and Utopic, which won the 2000 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. Her poetry has been anthologized in What
Will Suffice: Contemporary Poets on the Ars Poetica and
the 1997 Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American
Poetry. Her criticism has been reprinted in the 1993 edition of Contemporary
Authors. Ms. Keelan's honors include a 1990 Jesse Stuart Award for excellence in
teaching; a 1991 fellowship from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico; a 1992
grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women; and in 1997 The Secularist was
nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Author photo by John Zeibel
two poems from the devotion field
