The Bright Field of Everything

Poetry. In THE BRIGHT FIELD OF EVERYTHING, Deborah Fries builds upon the long-line, lyric narrative style of her first volume of poetry, Various Modes of Departure, to address familiar themes of place, love, mortality and modern life. Place plays a major role in this collection: from the ennui of a Massachusetts suburb and the transience of a town in shale country to the fresh joy found on a Minnesota hiking trail, Fries nurtures a sensibility shaped by surroundings. Love, however, is most often out of place or ill-timed in this second book, where dolphins shape- shift their way into women's beds, bucks drive does into oncoming traffic and men are as habituated as elephants. Love and loved ones are both constant and ephemeral in these poems, as the body becomes less reliable, friends are lost and yet, as in the field of everything, they remain with us.