Kathleen Wakefield

Kathleen Wakefield is the recipient of grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She has been a contributor to The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, The Journal, and Poetry. She has taught poetry in the schools in the Rochester area and at the Eastman School of Music. She lives in Penfield, New York. Her book, Notations on the Visible World, received the 1999 Anhinga Prize for Poetry.

NOTATIONS ON THE VISIBLE WORLD
BY KATHLEEN WAKEFIELD
$12.00. (email us for availability)

Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry (1999)

Notations on the Visible World is a spiritual quest characterized by the continual pull toward abstract faith and the opposite attraction of the real--and difficult--world. Kathleen Wakefield's steady voice turns the lens of attention sotto voce on the small--a detail of a painting, the inside of a flower, the movement of a rake in the hands of a dying woman. If grace is the ultimate object, it comes at some cost, and is hard-won. Wakefield sings alto to the melody of the natural world, finding the "shadows ornamenting shadows" in our daily ministrations. She makes "of musik" a documentation of doubt and belief, doing the "soul's work" by creating a memorable music of her own: "So much singing cannot be shut out." -- Judith Kitchen

Kathleen Wakefield's poems begin with attention--to the forest understory, the beetles and mosses, the deer, the light -- an attention that interrogates the complexities of nature, and yet without, as Keats put it, "any irritable reaching after fact or reason." And so each revelation, as it comes, feels effortless, as if Wakefield's insights were a path strewn with astonishing iridescences. There's a lot of wisdom here, and compassion. Her elegant lyrics are spiritual meditations that accommodate uncertainties with a pure gaze, honest and human, undogmatic as the dawn. It's a rare gift to be able to make a reader enter a poem on the same footing. Notations on the Visible World is an extraordinary and rewarding book. -- Barbara Jordan

Kathleen Wakefield's serene but determined voice is a welcome, long-overdue departure from the din of apologetic and noncommittal poets. Notations on the Visible World is a rare debut -- at once fresh and seasoned -- covering the expanse that separates faith from belief. These poems spring from ordinary soil and come to us as cantatas to God and Bach and Piero della Francesca; they pay homage to loved ones, rescuing their names from the great unsung repertoire of the world. It is a solid collection, placing Kathleen Wakefield in that select group of contemporary poets--Gerald Stern and Charles Wright among them--with an intimate handle on nature: even the darkest images are charged with a sense of joy, a soft light to show us just how elegant American poetry can be. -- Dionisio D. Martínez