Colin Harrington reviews Owen Lewis’s Field Light in the online journal Heavy Feather Review.
Field Light, by Owen Lewis, is a richly captivating collection of prose and poetry that is inspired by the aura of a creative, humanistic, and well-storied past of literature, sociology, psychoanalysis, music, and culture that defines the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The poetry plays out in an intense narrative reverberating from the quiet isolation of Lewis’ back porch, a focal point of the narrative, and the image featured in a photograph on the cover. The poet had sought refuge there in a time of traumatizing divorce and the towns of Berkshire County yield historic personalities, artists, and social history that connect and weave a tapestry of his own healing. Lewis describes the book as “a collage of the social, cultural, political, and personal history in and of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, a region that has championed the arts and social justice.” In this atmosphere, the poet finds unexpectedly redeeming resolutions that traverse time and space.
