The Flow of Wonder

A terrific collection showing Schofield’s rare ability to sort the strands of culture. The poems, variations on the sonnet form, are individually striking, emotionally complex. The sequence fuses several worlds—the Greek world that is happening now, archaic Greece (not a quoted world but lived in) of the islands and small villages—and, always, Schofield’s lost California past. Dennis Schmitz In the loose decasyllabic lines of The Flow of Wonder, the past flows into the immediate present in startling ways—Exodus into Cy Twombly, Odysseus into #MeToo, 1950s Fresno boyhood into Greek expat—as a restless consciousness shifts “beyond the personal” and into the political. In the undercurrent of these poems is a mind always engaging the world’s possibilities, “as if, as if as if,” a mind always struggling to pierce what’s “veiled.” Don Schofield crafts poems of deep pleasure and purpose, poems that insist upon the truth of “a single word.” Michael Waters In The Flow of Wonder, Don Schofield, despite being “always a stranger,” engages through degrees of belonging to the other, be it lover, country, past self, his daily surroundings, his readers, through art, memory, myth, biblical tales, with the speaker as himself and in persona poems. Schofield’s sonnets convey life experiences and color, from “hooks and bobbers” of his childhood in Fresno to decades later in Thessaloniki as he walks by the sea feeling weary and hearing “the silent axis of the broken world.” An expatriate, from country and love, he can relate to outsiders like Cassandra and the Syrian refugees landing on Greek shores. He lends his empathy and indignation to their voices. His poems, set against “the tide of loss, the thrust of fear,” seek a “habitat for love and emptiness.” “[T]he “journey,” he tells us, “is for love and nothing more,” a journey he makes through the writing of poems, considering the pains and lights of his life and the lives of others, difficult richnesses he crafts onto the page and brings to us.