The Wild Field
Rita Gabis
"This is a book of fury and memory. It takes all the lyric agendas—flowers and
distances and pastoral occasions—to the very edge of language and anger. And on that
edge craft is scalded by a real cadence of remembrance and reproach, and a true adventure
of womanhood and sexuality. These are often beautiful poems. They make much of dailiness
and its icons—wings and petals and a man's shirt. But they are never easy poems: they
make claims upon their own experience, they make claims upon our attention."
—Eavan Boland
"In this piercing first book the poet's art is consciousness. When Rita Gabis shines
the light of memory on one woman's history, she reveals an intimate portrait of the
feminine human life. These are ceremony poems where the ordinary and mythic come to meet
through passionate chants of understanding. The Wild Field bodies the word in us:
fragrant, erotically rooted, and holding our own."
—Carol Conroy
about the author
Rita Gabis’ poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, The Massachusetts Review, Columbia Magazine and elsewhere. Her grants and awards include a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a Connecticut State Arts Grant, and the Curtis Harnack residency at Yaddo. She has been a visiting writer at James Madison University and the University of Connecticut in New Britain.
