The Bunker in the Parsley Fields (Iowa Poetry Prize)

The Bunker in the Parsley Fields takes its cues from the particular music made by an old-fashioned rope swing; from a child ramming a trike over and over against a bomb shelter that is in the way; from a boy bouncing a ball off abandoned chinchilla hutches; from a man and a woman pushing a tremendous stone up a hill, lost between the slope and their shoulders - and once, in the orchard, lost in laughter. Many of the poems, including the title poem, come from the year that Gary Gildner lived in Slovakia. It was 1992-93, when Czechoslovakia split in two, a year of heightened excitement and uncertainty. Gildner and his wife lived in a cement box of a flat like thousands of others cheek by jowl above an abandoned bunker not far from the Tatra Mountains. They returned to a new home in Idaho's Clearwater Mountains, with Elizabeth expecting a child. The ideas of home, settlement, birth, rebirth, the past, the future, direction, luck, what matters, love, and work flow through the poems that shape this book.