Figure in a Field: Poems & Investigations

Siobhán Scarry

Illuminations: A Series on American Poetics
Edited by Jon Thompson

Information and Pricing
978-1-64317-653-6 (paperback; $18.95); 978-1-64317-5654-3 (PDF, $19.95); 978-1-64317-655-0 (EPUB, $19/95). © 2025 by Parlor Press. 94 pages.

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Description

Figure in a Field: Poems & Investigations, Siobhán Scarry’s second collection, combines poetry with hybrid works that blur the distinction between poetry and criticism. The author, a poet and scholar living in Kansas, turns her attention to the tallgrass prairie, not simply as the new landscape and ecosystem she and her young child explore, but as the departure point for an extended investigation into the pastoral form and its impulses. How do our writings about the natural world reveal the stumbles that have led us to our current environmental precarities? How might the land itself teach us otherwise? Suffused with epistolary energies, the collection addresses the Midwest, the prairie grasses, and the lyric itself as poems explore motherhood, resilience, and making a life in language. Deeply intertextual throughout, the poems and investigations make visible their debts to philosophers and poets from the American transcendentalist tradition to contemporary poetries and poetics.

What People Are Saying

In Figure in a Field: Poems & Investigations, Siobhán Scarry takes on the ecopoetics of a so-called flyover state, looking at the prairie as something both elegiac and evangelical. Each poem is an intervention with the pastoral as a mother in a burning world, asking if an idyll is always a fiction. In conversation with other poetic and feminist texts, this book is literary criticism meets poetic praxis. Scarry searches for forms – the epistolary, the hermit crab, the lyric essay – to hold what the body can no longer carry. Insightful and beautifully written, Figure in a Field asks what we can do when all the wandering that's left is in our own thoughts and how to care for the world when we have infinite love but finite time. —Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal; Poet Laureate of Kansas 2023–2026

 “I have learned the simplest things late, but not last. . . . My child, what do you make of the night birds? Your new hearing, mine revised,” says Siobhán Scarry, in her interrogative new Figure in a Field: Poems & Investigations. Echoing Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, Scarry finds her mythos not in the geologic past but in the immediate needs of her son, the figure of care: love as “the fractured package language arrives in.” The place is Kansas, the random draw of an academic life. The interrogation is the pastoral, the de facto lyric mode but also its idealized and gendered production, a male gaze struck by the sound of its voice. For our harvests are actual responsibilities, or what does the pastoral leave out? “You may put a toddler in your eclogue like another goat or flower, but someone must make sure the child does not brain himself on the rocks.” The full title’s key; the “investigation” is a kind of auto-ethnography of a writing life, its ambitions and disappointments, durations and surprises. Figure in a Field is a lyric liberation, or a liberation from the lyric only, w/self-interviews, letters, prose poems, erasures, footnotes, a feminist breviary, a long intertextual “a-pastoral,” a field guide to roaming, and a loving treatise on single parenting. Bountiful, self-revealing as process, but also a source book of creativity itself, Figure in a Field is that rare thing, a book both beautiful and useful. —Matthew Cooperman, author of Spool, Time, & Its Monument, and the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless

This is a book of meadowing that widens the pastoral to let in everything else that is life itself. What lies outside the frame cuts through the scene as it unfolds, making the pastoral not frozen but as changeable and fluid as time itself. This book offers the only antidote to the present, presenting what is real as the way through to a future with no end and no beginning—only the poem can open the field wide enough for the green world to enter. —K Prevallet, author of A Varied and Tender Multiplicity 

About the Author

Siobhán Scarry is a poet, critic, and educator. She is the author of the poetry collection Pilgrimly (Parlor Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in About Place Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, Mid-American Review, The Missouri Review, New Letters, Terrain, and elsewhere. Her scholarly work on 20th- and 21st-century American poetries has appeared in Sagetrieb, Southern Humanities Review, Paideuma, and elsewhere. Scarry earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana and a PhD in English from the poetics program at SUNY Buffalo. She is currently a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Bethel College in Kansas.

Photograph of the author by Siobhán Scarry. Used by permission.