Field Folly Snow is book-ended by two one line poems:
The Wish for a Garden
I could grow old again.
and
The Wish for a Field
Were I loved, I would be braver.
Both of these speak to the middleworld Field Folly Snow inhabits, an impossible locale in which one struggles to embody a previous innocence despite the irreconcilable and competing wish to bravely be one’s true self: Here, Field Folly Snow explores romantic love as a violent, transformative medium that storms the “poor fort” of the heart “never meant for stockade.” In extension, the American West, with its relatively recent history of conquest and displacement, is analogous to the disillusioned lover, and also the place where the forces of capture and abandonment collide, where in Bonneville, Wyoming, “Along the highway there’s a place/where nothing’s left: suggestive mounds of dirt,/ a marker to commemorate abandon inside/ this elbow of the Green.”
“I Lost My Horse,” the first poem in section one, makes the loss of romantic love this collection’s point of departure, and the search for self, in language and landscape, the terrain.
When I spoke, my story was about picking
skulls clean. I wanted everything to be
afraid of me, the horseless girl who wanted
to kill a dead man again. The white bed
with a window behind its headboard became
ice on the meadow road and a tree to stop
a truck dead. I meant to trace my boot steps
back to the fence where things went wrong,
find my horse mouthing the bit, tied up by her
reins. I looked for the horse because she looked
safe enough to love. I looked for the calf
or lamb because there was no calf or lamb.
The man left before I could leave him, and I pretended
the world was afraid of me because I was alone.
Birds are as hushed
as ropes hanging
in rows, imagining what I imagine ropes
imagine: unlooping
towards the being wavering
on the precipice of circumstance
who inarticulately begs for the assertion
of something encircling her uncertain waist
For Parks, the "I" and the “eye” are fused and language a tether that entraps and liberates alternately, creating a strange logic: freedom is a consequence and entrapment a wish. Just as love vacillates between entrapment and liberation—“I had mastered/ cold work; I thought I could leave anyone.” — the self seeks containment and rupture: “There I said it. I remain on the road, a horse, three horses in my throat.” Field Folly Snow is a book rich with paradox, between deep sensuality and labyrinthine loneliness.
Section three, a sequence of epistolary poems, for which Park depends upon Elizabeth Pruitt Stewart’s “Letters of a Woman Homesteader” (1914) for much of the language, adds a formal rawness to the sonnets unrhymed tercets and couplets that comprise most of the book. Here, the lyric voice finds resonance beyond the speaker. This is a compelling strategy, and the fragmentary style of these letters is similar to the fragmentary nature of history itself, especially in regards to the recounting of trauma and its aftermath.
After a Loss
Dear Mrs.,
Came happiest, were disappointed. Courage half-filled a direc-
tion of tears.
Field-glasses, stocking leg, scrambled canyon rock. One bedstead
would go.
Curtains wonder like white material.
Additionally, Field Folly Snow includes letters written in a prose poem style to figures of the rugged West: a pistolsmith, a horsebreaker, a saddlethief, and a stream warden. Park’s use of language in these poems is highly self-conscious, and at times, the machinery of language is used as metaphor:
The lesson in fencing and submission, rope versus lariat—how grammar subdues in the panhandled state like a bit slid between the teeth.
-- from Letter to the Horsebreaker
There is a palpable anxiousness in these letters, a frenzied repetition and reworking of phrases in variation:
Warden, the river is lighter than a holster at night, its sound louder than the sound I make for you, and I could not bring myself to call you darling. Instead of my hand, I’m placing a pistol in your hand. I’m fashioning a flashlight and a night to orbit around it. A covered bridge with a negative camber. I am trying hard to make you look for me. No, I am trying to make it hard for you to look for me. I cannot bring myself to fashion myself in front of you.
- from Letter to the Stream Warden
In each of these there is the struggle of expression, lyrically, and in extension, the speaker herself is coming to terms with exposure. These letters can be read as monologues, and the rhetorical address as inward, revealing a strategy by which the speaker searches for her own identity as a poet, as someone who understands herself and others through the both defensive and vulnerable use of language. Park’s prosody is melodic and alliterative, and she’s adept at dramatic rhetoric and line, spuring the reader to consider the more subconscious meanings and lyrical potentiality of language when it is used as a polyvalent and unpredictable medium.
Field Folly Snow evokes the power of utterance and many moments testify to speaking as an elemental force equal to wind, rain, and earthquakes. Delving into the elusive language of landscape, elusive because the speaker is implicated within that landscape by the act of looking, the speaker’s existence is simultaneously contested and affirmed by the rugged, indomitable mountains and oceanic meadows and skies of the western states.
One’s approach to their subject can often reflect intent, and Park’s poetics reveal the physicality of language when, in lines like “Solstice dabbles behind the hills, whitefire at the horizon well/ into what should be evening, well into after, meting out to/ what should be the privacy of night illumination enough to fray/ the sky” she machines ahead sonically, leaving the meaning half-formed, forming (from How from Politeness to the Trees).
Like a wanderer always in pursuit of some supernal truth, both language and that which it describes falls away as insufficient; and like a warrior, primordial feelings of shame and terror, of our need to love and abandon what we love, to claim and be claimed remain uncontestable elemental truths, comparable to the force of an earthquake as in “Self-Portrait as a Seismograph”:
Be peak to my trough, be hand
fastened to my throat. Shake me
something fierce and I’ll be the figure
of what you did.
