Field Guide A Tempo (The Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series)

Poetry. Volume IX of the Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series.

Suppose I try to describe faithfully the prospect which a strain of music exhibits to me. The field of my life becomes a boundless plain...—Thoreau

Prompted by Thoreau's thought-experiment, FIELD GUIDE A TEMPO is a topographical map of sounds, a landscape that changes pace, from ballad to dirge to lullaby, tracing the contours of those rhythms that give form and voice to Time itself. If sound became visible, what shapes would it take? What images would flash before our eyes? And if those images were set once more to music, could we sing them with all our senses? In music, the phrase a tempo directs the musician to play once again at an original speed. But what is our original speed, or are there more than one? This "field guide," unlike all scientific manuals before it, sets life going at the changing rhythms of ancient myth, natural wonder, and human love, and lets us sing them: "Consigned to no one but time, but to continuous / Tempos, their racings, my racings, their easing, mine."