by Loisa Fenichell | Contributing Writer

Field Music
Alexandria Hall
HarperCollins, 2020
I was nineteen when I lived for a summer in Vermont. I worked on a farm, harvesting vegetables and feeding chickens. Several years later, immediately post-college, I found myself living in and negotiating the streets of Brooklyn. The differences between these two localesâVermont and Brooklynâare stark and numerous. These are also the locales, Vermont in particular, that figure most significantly into Alexandria Hallâs Field Music, winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series, selected by Rosanna Warren, and published by Ecco Press (HarperCollins 2020). Via her observations of Vermont, Hall falls into a long line of poets associated with the particular region (Robert Frost and Louise GlĂŒck immediately come to mind). This pastoral tradition is not a new one; it can be traced back to 750 BCE, to Greek poet Hesiod. But Hallâs collection puts a contemporary spin on the ancient convention. Her collection creates a dizzying effect and seems to occupy a liminal space. This is the effect that prowling through the concavities of memory can create. Renowned Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung writes of âthe shadow,â those parts of ourselves that feel so elusive. But these are the partsâthis is the shadowâthat Hall, through lush, beguiling, and direct language, taps into so well. In order to do this, she must first tap into the archives of memory.
In an interview conducted for Literary North, Hall tells the interviewerâRena J. Mosteirin, also a poetâthat she did not intend for setting to figure so prominently into Field Music. âPlace plays an important role in the book,â she articulates, âbut the setting of each poem was a result of the memory . . . belonging to a given place.â This feels true in such poems as âCowbird,â the collectionâs initiating poem:
Nothing ever stays
Where it ought: runoff dragged into the river
By summer rains from shit-covered fields â
My thickly perfumed Vermont.
Hall does not begin this poem, however, with Vermont. She starts instead with the words, âAll of this damage . . . â; that is, she opens with memory. Even the jaggedness of the lines in âCowbirdââsome more left-aligned than othersâfeels like a visual representation of what the recalling of memory so often feels like. Later in the poem, when speaking of âthe shafts of the garden / vegetables,â she writes,
Sometimes we canât see
the dangers we feed, that we nurture
Lines like this, âwe canât see / the dangers we feedââas is the case with later poems, like the titular poem âField Music,â in which it is written, âI lied at my first confessionâ and âI know about sex. Itâs not a cardinal / flying into the wrong windowââseem to tap directly into those elusive realms. In the final stanza we have,
I know
Iâm not invited. I want
to love something.
Perhaps through this archival process and through the writing of this collection, Hall is also searching for âsomethingâ to âlove.â
In the very next poem, âTravel Narrative,â the first poem of Section I (the collection is divided into two segments), Hall travels from Middlebury, Vermont, where âThere was too much moon over the night in Middlebury,â to Germany, where âThere were too many monuments // pouring water over their copper busts, a verdigris rain / on the fountain of the Hamburger Rathaus.â The poem concludes with,
Remember
there were too many shadows and they changed too often.
Remember I wanted to go home,
which was a shadow, so I didnât.
âTravel Narrativeâ feels like the perfect introduction for this first section of a collection that is, ultimately, an act of remembrance. In the poem âMy Love,â as with âTravel Narrative,â the reader is taken again on a trip, though this time the voyage is made from BrooklynââThat thing that happened once again. / In a kitchen in Brooklyn. / At a rooftop screeningââto, yes, Vermont, âUnder the table in Middlebury.â
Hall writes on more than just memory, though; she calls forth the beauty of the earth. Such is the case in âOn Beauty,â which concludes with, âwhatâs beautiful is as easy as spotting the light. Spotting the deer in the field.â The poem takes on the form of four prose stanzas, bringing to mind poet Robert Hassâs observation in his book A Little Book on Form, âthere is a tension in the form between prose as the medium of realist representation and poetry as the medium of the transformation of the world through imaginationâ (38). âOn Beauty,â fittingly, occupies that liminal space between ârealist representationâ and âtransformation of the world through imagination.â
But the world isnât always directly or explicitly verdant. There can be a quieter and eerier quality to some of Hallâs work. Take, for example, âReturn,â a poem placed towards the end of the collection (and a poem that also, as with âTravel Narrativeâ makes reference to Germanyââreturning / to Reuterstrabeâ). Hall writes,
I watched the lurid sky
over the bay with its tight jaw unhinged, as the butter-blond light
poured out.
Words like âluridâ or descriptions such as âtight jaw unhingedâ donât exactly call to mind decadent beauty. Instead, a reader might feel a particular sort of anxiety thinking of a âbay with its tight jaw unhinged.â It must be noted, however, that these observations of the âlurid skyâ and âthe bayâ are juxtaposed with the lovely and alliterative âbutter-blond light / poured out.â Indeed, the poem continues,
To this and that I pointed and said, Look,
itâs beautiful.
The poem too is heavily saturated in nostalgia, as is the case with much of the collectionâfitting when discussing memoryâ
My undue nostalgia, sour
in an empty mouth
and
I missed someone. No,
I missed myself in certain time and location.
I saw what I had missed and I was never coming back.
The poem ends powerfully with,
Left a strange moisture there. Icky balm of having wanted.
Hall, as is evident via âstrange moistureâ and âicky balm,â is not afraid of using what might be considered to be cruder images. Simultaneously, there is a universality encompassed in âhaving wantedâ and this universality renders even the âcruder bitsâ beautiful.
It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the musicality readily apparent in this collection. After all, Hall is not only a poet; she is a musician and has acknowledged in interviews the connections between her crafting of songs and her crafting of poetry. There is a poem, for example, called âOn Music,â written in tercet form, that indeed does have the rhythm of a song:
As if wanting
me were a song he hummed
without knowing, I listened . . .
Field Music often feels like one long folk song, or at the very least an album of folk songs: a rhythmic and riveting collection of expedition and the excavation of memory. Hall is intimately aware of the power of language, of the paintings and images language has the ability to create. It can feel like an act of magic, to spin memory into language, into the form of poetry, but this is precisely what Hall does so well.
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Loisa Fenichell’s poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in various publications, such as Winter Tangerine Review, Sundog Lit, and Guernica Magazine. More can be found at loisafenichell.com
Alexandria Hall is from Vermont. Her debut poetry collection, Field Music (Ecco, 2020), was selected by Rosanna Warren as a winner of the National Poetry Series. She holds an MFA from New York University and is now a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She is founder and editor-in-chief of Tele- Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in LARB Quarterly Journal, Narrative, BOAAT, The Bennington Review, Hobart, and The Yale Review, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.