A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke

“[T]his new anthology’s many critical voices suit Roethke’s multi-faceted work…. A Field Guide should bring new readers closer to the liveliness of Roethke’s poems, which will become their own.” — Zach Savich, Poetry Northwest

“[T]he Field Guide brings together all the elements needed for a sophisticated understanding of Roethke, his contexts, and his art. It presents leading historical and contemporary critical approaches to his poetry, and it suggests areas deserving further study.” — Philip A. Greasley, MidAmerica

“This book draws readers closer to Roethke’s poetry than any other single study has. Recommended.” — Choice

“Barillas’s thoroughly diverse and democratic reassessment of Roethke’s radically diverse oeuvre resituates Roethke’s high and proper place in American poetry…. A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke has altered and deepened my thinking, not just about Roethke but poetry itself.” — Alexander Long, Poetry International Online

“This ingeniously structured ‘field guide’ to Roethke’s poetry reintroduces us to a body of work that changed the sound and sense of twentieth-century poetry. Timely, engaging, and stylistically diverse essays consider Roethke’s poems from new angles, and situate him as an early practitioner of ecopoetry. These reappraisals remind us of the power of Roethke’s ‘weird word-music,’ his mastery of the greenhouse’s ‘alien textures,’ and the reach of his ‘defamiliarizing’ poetic language, which influenced Sylvia Plath, Robert Bly, James Wright, Seamus Heaney, and so many others. This is an indispensable collection for a new generation of Roethke’s readers.” — Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“What a lovely model this book sets: a gathering of short essays by skilled readers on a great poet whose work is ripe for rediscovery. William Barillas has devised an elegant format that allows many voices to sound in a variety of registers, while keeping the poems themselves constantly in the foreground. This book offers scholars, poets, teachers, and students a wide array of paths through the inexhaustibly rich terrain of Roethke’s poems, traversing their vibrant renderings of both inner and outer landscapes, their sustained dialogue with poetic tradition, and their prescient engagement with environmental concerns.” — Roger Gilbert, author of Walks in the World: Representation and Experience in Modern American Poetry

“These essays, written from multiple perspectives, make a welcome and accessible companion to Roethke’s Collected Poems, while making the case for exploring the full range of the poet’s work.” — Christopher MacGowan, author of Twentieth-Century American Poetry

“A long overdue re-examination and celebration of the incandescent work of poet Theodore Roethke, bringing his work to a whole new generation of readers. Highly recommended.” — Nicholas O’Connell, author of On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature

“Roethke’s large, multitudinous body of work, while never out of print, has somehow gotten lost in the past decades. This book, expertly edited by William Barillas, should help rectify that odd neglect. It puts his work in perspective.” — Edward Hirsch, from the Foreword

“One of the great strengths of this book is its reconsideration of Roethke’s work in the light of critical developments such as ecocriticism, feminist criticism, and reader response theory. This is an extremely timely and important collection.” — Sally Connolly, author of Grief & Meter: Elegies for Poets after Auden

What the Field Guide effectively reveals in its contributions, all of which are worthy of critical celebration, is that when we read closely, from any perspective[,] . . . we can discover the lasting qualities of poetry, and in this instance a poet whose quality of self-critique has never been more needed for the nation. — American Book Review