Woman Crossing a Field

In Woman Crossing a Field, Deena Linett uses language as a dancer uses limbs, each gesture deliberate and expressive. Her poems gently unsheath the choices we make, exposing their consequences that linger as love, grief, hope, or wonder. Often set within the landscape, within grass shaped by wind and stone grooved by rain, Linett's poems allow these small decisions the same relentless power as the forces of nature. The centerpiece of Woman Crossing a Field is a triptych, "Altarpiece," a suite of fifteen poems, which function as landscape paintings do, suggesting the flow of life as well as this time and this place.

3 Men: Portraits Without the Human Figure

Hotel-casino: lights flash, crowds tread
patterned carpets hoping for a turn
in fortune. Despite the ardent wishes
of the women you have left you are not dead.
You’re good at lively passing things
that happen here: at restaurants, in bed,
at tables tossing dice and cards. That smudge
at bottom right stands in for me, and you plunge
breathless into chance as into women, risk
like drink obliterating everything.

~

Studio: smells of linseed oil and turpentine. Brushes,
palette knives, mixing-sticks; bottles, jars, tubes. Paint
in daubs and gobs and smears and dots and slashes.
You left the window open and everything stained.

~

Greenhouse: Beneath little panes pocked
by time and dotted with mold and lichen, rot,
a riot of tropical effulgence, small framed portion
of the endlessness. Spiky plants blossom
like ideas; light glances off the glass and gleams
on the permanent hunger, steams. Everything
blooms or is green. You shrug into your coat.

© BOA Editions, Ltd 2006

Available editions: 
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-929918-79-9
Price: $14.95
Publishing Date: June 2006