Book Review

Dorinda Wegener’s debut collection Four Fields builds a world for the reader to step into from the first poem. A Perianesthesia Certified Registered Nurse in Richmond, Virgina, with work published in journals such as Indiana Review, THRUSH, and Hunger Mountain Review, Wegener reveals a house and garden, a homestead and family, dark woods and strange figures of God. Memory and language itself are laid bare and questioned, deconstructed and reconstructed. In this domestic milieu, the eye always pushes past the apparent to the internal substance of parent-child relationships in their tenderness and pain. Wegener is reckoning with life—her own and those closest to her—with an open, balanced gaze. She returns to the homestead of her childhood and repeats, “these were My fields,” and in them poems have grown, sprouting confessions alongside recollection and reconciliation. She states her purpose at the end of her opening poem addressing her mother, “I write you with the intention of amendment, with thrift / to thrive penances: green as forgiveness, trepid as love.”

Little is as it first appears in Wegener’s poetry, with the natural setting of Virginia used copiously for its concrete and metaphorical richness. In the opening section, she writes, “you were a fig tree” and “my sister is always a rabbit” and her mother is figured as a bird. Similarly, in the title poem “Four Fields,” the four sections of the poem address the four keystones of her family: mother, father, sister, and brother. It begins with the farm, silo, and soup, and ends with a headstone and wind. In between is the dream of survival and the “first of forty days,” alluding to, perhaps, periods of fasting or tribulation. Wegener’s gaze is cool at times, not giving in to emotional nostalgia and instead maintaining the distance needed to see clearly, sometimes speaking of her family as if from an external perspective: “In his Sunday suit, the oldest / son remains plot-side. / My brother.”

Her language is carefully constructed, but still often playful, not afraid to make puns or punching alliteration. “In her fledge-less field, I fowl the not being // wanted.” Her words ensnare with the granular details of narrative, “tennis-shoe soles too wet; the skin // on my knees tore the penned beginning,” and yet she draws attention to the use of language itself, “Now, I unbutton // my alphabet: all i’s and o’s.” Wegener’s dexterous handling of craft is perhaps best showcased in instances like these where sound, syntax, and language for its own sake spill together in unexpected waterfalls, startlingly clear and essential to her quest for understanding of self and other. Her diction is incredibly precise, sparing no room for breadth where a tighter word could fit, continually showcasing her knowledge of the natural and biological world.

Throughout this collection, we encounter figures of Christ and religion in unexpected places, odd and startling, like finding a face in grains of wood. Despite, or perhaps because of, its mundane familiarity, the religious rituals bare ominous undertones reminiscent of southern gothic literary traditions. The speaker claims to have seen Christ twice, although one or both encounters may have been knowing fabrications. After his apparitions in the first section, Christ seems to become a figure for the speaker and other characters to slide in and out of. Her mother “pointed to the door, said, See this, this is my blood,” and the speaker practices stigmata in a bathroom.

There is a sense of innocence crucified or the realization that innocence never existed. We are not in Eden, and “There is no tree of knowledge.” “Yes, I grapple with God,” Wegener writes, and “There is no metaphor to carry this fire.” Fire cannot be squelched in this collection, where even the “wind burns” and “snow flames off the roof,” and neither can the memories of this shifting gothic world the speaker now returns to. At the well’s bottom, a makeshift ossuary, we find “The child alone except for these ossein / dreams, her remembered bones.”

A somber note resonating throughout the collection, the third section opens with a poem revealing that her mother unexpectedly died despite the speaker’s, like most children’s, expectation that “To persist, that’s what mothers and myths do.” Grief is palpable as the speaker questions the medical causes of death, the potential genetic components, and their father’s simultaneous decline into dementia. Memories of her mother and the emptiness that now stands in her place are addressed with grief, as seen through the physicality of nature and the home they shared. Here grief looks like unpreserved fruits, “the hinge on pantry door,” and faces recognized not as loved ones, but only strangers. “I have no words for lack that holds / late into a mother’s spring / harder than the blue ice.”

The final section holds space for the slower, prolonged grief of losing her father to dementia. These poems are tender, soft almost. A series of poems are addressed as for him, and in the last of these, Wegener writes, “I am waiting for my father / to return to the body of / my father, the man” (slashes in text). Here we see the grief of a present absence. In the face of an unconquerable disease, there is little else to do but return to “this language spoken / not through my lips that I have.”

Near the end of our journey, there is a tone of weariness after much loss. It is night and “the light we can see in tonight’s sky is from stars already left.” There is little to look towards for hope except perhaps the light itself, traveled so far, to show us the blades of grass at our feet. The collection ends on “The Threshing Floor,” a tapestry of biblical allusions that slides a final figure into Christ’s silhouette—the land itself, present as grounding force, consoler, and shepherd since the beginning.

“may the land take us to breast . . .

may the land leave us out to prove,

may we rise, together, by grace.”