Owen Lewis is interviewed about his book of poems Field Light in the Berkshire Edge’s Berkshire Reads.
TBE: Briefly, tell us what this book is about.
OL: Field Light is a book of and about the Berkshires. Written in mostly poetry, but with some prose and drama, it is a story that encompasses the social, cultural, and political history of the Berkshires as personal discovery. Thoughout these pages, history becomes folk-lore, as its main character, sometimes me, often departing from me, looks to understand his own history and comes to see personal history as affected by, and effecting, shared history. The histories of the Mahigan, of Mumbet and Theodore Sedgewick, W.E.B. Du Bois, Patty Hearst, authors such as Hawthorne and Melville, the more contemporary poets including those from Worcester, artists like Daniel Chester French and Norman Rockwell, the music of Tanglewood and the music of Arlo Guthrie are all part of the living history that makes the Berkshires what they are. Threads of these stories are woven into the fabric of the book which I believe reads with the fluidity of a novel but with the intensity of poetry.
