Micro Review of The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It, by Molly Bashaw

The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It

Micro Review of The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It, by Molly Bashaw

 

The Word Works, 2014: $15.00 paperback

 
 
Sometimes a book comes out of nowhere and absolutely owns you for a full 70 pages. So it was for me with Bashaw’s debut collection, The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It. She invites you into the family farm, full of work, tenderness, and the agrarian language that seems contained inside a pumpkin ripening near the vetch. “What is farm?” she asks in the most ambitious poem in the book “A Talk with Chagall,” only to answer, “The bones of trees oiled with honey,/ the castrated pigs hurling shouts at my father.” I’m sorry, but that may be the most poignant definition of the word farm I’ve ever read, and the freshness of connections between language and meaning drives the poetry on nearly every page.
 
 
 
In “Learning to Read,” the speaker recalls leaving her book out in the field in the rain, losing it, and confessing: “I still have not found my book// but I can smell those horses through the dark:// I could put them into my mouth and say them.” And that’s what she’s inviting you to do. Bashaw invites you to put her dredged up history into your mouth and say it, speak it out loud, as though it were your own, make it exist as plainly as your own tongue working to recall each forgotten syllable. This is by far one of the best books that will be published in 2014, and I say that without hesitation. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and I suggest you do yourself a favor and pay this book, this farm, a visit.
 
—by Travis Mossotti