The field is integral, too, to Dan Beachy-Quick’s Circle’s Apprentice—the field of vision, field of the empty page and of the populated page, field of self/ body/maker, absence of field. It is from these fields that Beachy-Quick enters into a conversation with Emerson et al. …more

Figure, noun, a person’s bodily shape or a person seen indistinctly, especially at a distance. A representation of a human in a drawing or a sculpture, a shape defined by lines, a pattern formed by the movements of groups of people.

To figure is to be a significant part of something, to calculate or work out. If you’re figuring, you’re thinking, considering, expecting something to be the case. To figure is to represent, from the Latin figura, ‘shape or form’ and is related to fingere, ‘form, contrive’. To figure is to be alive, maybe. To be a figure in a landscape.

And then there’s figure in the title poem of Gail Mazur’s new book, Figures in a Landscape, which I love for its precision, its deliberate action in the face of grief. The fact that I could look up figure in the dictionary and know that at least five or six of its definitions would be at play in this poem, too, was exciting; a gateway to a nighttime playground. This is what certain lovers of words do in order to inhabit language itself, toiling for days, weeks on one word, seeking out the best primary, secondary, tertiary definitions, and the cultural, theoretical, and (in this poem, particularly) personal connotations of a word. …more