Field Knowledge

Morri Creech

Field Knowledge

2005 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

J.D. McClatchy, Judge

"There are austere poets whose very distance from the world and whose reticent style create a tension that brings the experience described and the poem enacted into a sharper, more heartbreaking focus. And there are luxuriant poets - poets like Keats and Whitman and Hopkins - for whom the world's bounty and the heart's bottomless mysteries spill over into lines that almost burst with excess. Morri Creech is a luxuriant, but a canny one...

[H]e has made a book in which a reader can both lose and find himself. Field Knowledge is a rare achievement, and a lasting one."

—from the judge's foreword