Field Play by Susan McCaslin is an exploration of the ontological kinships between the metaphysical and physical in the sacred web of life. These poems, invoking the mystics, are filled with mythology, ancestors, creatures, and the natural world. The collection opens with “an eternal pasture folded in all thought” and a “sphere within a sphere opening to infinity” as McCaslin, contemplative and poet, invites readers on a cosmic sojourn through four fields via the primordial stream running through them.
We begin in the field of Kith and Kin, where, in the manner of Czesław Miłosz’s “Encounter,” McCaslin’s “A Quiet Refuge” addresses transience, as the speaker recounts her father remembering a moment as a young boy on a stair, then, “he is gone, the stair gone, the moment gone” (19). The poems in this section recall a traumatized mother “with a jouissance” (21), a lefthanded grandmother, foremothers, elders, “so many modes of blue” (34) and “the radiance bolting/ from the faces of men, women and children” as Merton beheld “on the corner of Fourth and Walnut/ division gone” (37). With this theme—division gone—McCaslin guides us into Gaia Fields, with echoes of Rumi and other spiritual guides. Poems drop their punctuation as lines and sensory images of the natural world and creaturely kin flow “deep in the underground/ mycorrhizae and lichen [serve] sacraments without requiring belief” (45). The four elements, Air, Earth, Fire, and Water repeat throughout as a refrain. In this field McCaslin gathers poets, mystics and mythology. Here, “winged Pegasus, / still untamed, offspring of Gaia, [who] touched down his hooves at Helicon/ and sacred waters flowed” (64).
The third section has, for its epigraph, the words of Thomas Merton, from Hagia Sophia stating that in all visible things is a hidden wholeness, a mysterious unity that is Wisdom. We enter War Fields where the Dark Madonna “still holds [her] Ukrainian children to [her] breast…wondering what the days will bring” (72). Here is poetry in times of peril, for “grief too, has a high place of honour” (72). “Gaia turns, tremulous/ at Putin’s war. / What next as we turn, and turn?” (73). Putin, tyrants, Dante’s Satan, Job, Virgil and Dante and Beatrice make appearances in this field of quantum physics and black holes where “seeds burst into sunflowers / a darkness through which we pass/ and are reborn . . . Sophia-Logos yoked/ in intertwining oxymorons/ the angel in a child’s eye/ lost in the brutal slam of missiles” (76). The poet exhorts the reader, “Let us name disasters and weep” (81), holding apparent oppositions, [n]either falling into pits of hatred and despair/ nor abandoning the arc of hope” (83). McCaslin writes to Sophia in “Beauty for Ashes,” and “lays out her garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (87) before entering the Cosmic Field.
In the Cosmic Field, our neurons are galaxies, our body, once the belly of a star, and all life a sentient circle, as “we are wildly / composed / discomposed recomposed” (101). At the time of this review, following Artemis II’s successful trip to the moon’s far side, the questions posed by “Artemis Grounding” are still cogent. Thomas Merton similarly asks, “What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?” The poem’s speaker asks, “How can those ignoring ancient ways, while closing their guarded gates to inner space/dare plant their tokens of ownership on the moon?” (105). In response, McCaslin prays, “let this poem ride a comet/ into a billion blazing suns. . .become a nimbus/ wrapped around words” (106). In this final section, it is the “Figure of Light” through which all four fields converge, wherein “the figure is, from head to foot, a blazing light . . . one light . . . singular light lighting every person and tribe / light of seasonless, season-full/ stars lighting every true path/ rivers of enlightenment . . . and where, “we are not alone” (111).
This collection is a longer book of poetry than is typical, over a hundred pages. The poems range in style and form, arranged in sections on ancestors and relationships, the natural world/planet, war, and mystery, holding all things in opposition, through which flows the essence of life. That is, Field Play, composed of prayers and chants, wisdom and light, is a book of unity and oneness in which “love is unspeakable” (113). In Field Play, Susan McCaslin invokes the ars poetica of mystics and poets, along with her own yearning to speak the unspeakable with lyric beauty, grace, and hope.
Field Play by Susan McCaslin was published by Ekstasis Editions in 2024.
Connie T. Braun is a Vancouver-based poet, memoirist, and creative-writing instructor. She holds an MA in Humanities, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and her poetry, essays, and reviews are published in international literary and academic journals and anthologies. She has published two nonfiction books: The Steppes Are the Colour of Sepia (2008) and Silentium; and Other Reflections on Sorrow, Memory, Place and the Sacred (2017). Her poetry has been set to music by Canadian composers, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection Moonroads (CMU Press) was published in 2025, and her collection The Stellium in This House is forthcoming from Wildhouse Publishing in 2027. She is a full member of the League of Canadian Poets.