Don Schofield

Celebrating four decades of living in Greece, A DIFFERENT HEAVEN: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS joins the more prominent poems from Donald Schofield's five previous collections (three full length books and two chapbooks) with more recent work and a sampling of translations from modern Greek that have influenced his writing and continue to resonate off it. Taken together, the poems in this collection chart one American's experience of living in a part of the world where the ancient and modern, the urban and rural, and the mythical and mundane intermingle in wondrous and sometimes disconcerting ways. As the poems go deeper into the land, language and culture the author has come to embrace, they engage in an ongoing dialogue with such ancients as Homer, Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle. Other poems speak in the voice of marginalized biblical figures, such as Hagar, Joseph and Lazarus. Earlier free verse looks out at the world from within Egyptian sarcophagi and beneath the gilded surface of Byzantine icons. More recent blank verse and sonnets interact with shepherds and poets; painters and refugees; archaeologists, cemetery workers and assorted others who people the landscape that he now calls home. "For the past three decades Don Schofield has been writing and publishing the deeply affecting and finely crafted poems gathered here in a single volume, poems 'determined by nothing / but rhythm,' the rhythm of our lives as we lean into 'the glittering present.' Ranging from his adopted Greece with its cries of lambs--I aam, I aam--and its refugee camps to Nepal where he watches 'a tiger eating what remained of a baby water buffalo' to Hart Island in NY with its 'unclaimed dead in their plywood coffins' to the dusty Fresno of his violent boyhood where he imagines a place 'where love isn't fear,' these poems cast a precise eye on the natural landscape and our place in it: 'You can tell we're humans / by our short-billed caps.' A Different Heaven is a book best read slowly to savor the 'gentle lure' of these necessary and enduring poems."--Michael Waters "Wherever the poem comes from--from the poet's earthly place, I mean: say, Nevada, Montana, Italy, Greece, Egypt. anywhere--in the case of Don Scofield's work, the poem comes from somewhere the reader will recognize as implicitly true, minutely accurate, and abundantly beautiful. This is work by a man as in love with language as he is with the world and with this earth. You will be moved; you'll be astonished. You'll be very glad you read this book."--Robert Wrigley

Written over a period of twenty years, the poems in this collection chart the experiences of an American living in Greece. This odyssey of sorts is told in four parts, tracing a personal journey from naivete and alienation to identity and belonging. Don Schofield touches upon urban and island life in contemporary Greece that few outsiders see. Skillfully juxtaposing the old with the new, the expected with the unexpected, the historical with the modern, he entertains various themes bringing the past into relation with the present. Seemingly disparate traditions are merged - the pagan with the Christian, American literature with classical Greek. The main speaker often appears as the antithesis of the classical hero, Odysseus, willing to look foolish, lost and bewildered, and at times acknowledging his own moral weakness. Conventional interpretations of myth are redefined as personas from the archaic and biblical worlds examine the nature of desire or the experience of loss and exile on a contemporary stage. By dint of acute observation and innate sensitivity, Schofield evokes a sense of place by working himself into the psyche of the people and the landscape, thus enabling him to enr

Set in Fresno, the Sierra Nevadas and Greece, the poems in Before Kodachrome look back unflinchingly at a fractured California childhood in the 1950s and ‘60s. In the process they lay out in stark contrast the dimensions of a life where parents, real and surrogate, are at once loving and violent, attentive and neglectful, righteous and morally bankrupt. From his adopted homeland, the cradle of Western civilization, the poet weaves stories from classical mythology, the Old Testament, fairy tales and popular American culture that show how a balanced adult self can be formed, not by avoiding childhood trauma and insistently “moving on,” but by using language and narrative to delve deep into one’s past and bring back artifacts that provide meaning, stability and, yes, at times, transcendence.

In his superb new volume, Don Schofield deepens into loss of love and language, of history and home. The greatest thing s to leave no mark at all, he affirms, yet longing draws us to moments when nothing matters but the curve / of one body in the hollow of another. The questions Schofield poses Where do the lost words go? and how many // blessings do I need? echo across the distances between lovers, between countries. In Lands Imagination Favors reverberates with such exquisite and ineffable uncertainties. --Michael Waters A stunning collection Don Schofield s poetry, his sensibility, has traveled through two cultures to make itself. As a result, the poems are unusually rich, vibrant with the personal losses, direct in the articulation of the pleasures of the journey. --Dennis Schmitz As the title of one of these poems suggests, a major focus here is traveling Greece, but the modes for doing so are original, highly evocative, at the end profoundly moving. The landscape is chosen to offer color through details that are both recognizable and metaphoric, places that carry a name familiar to those who celebrate the life of the senses but who are also transported to the land of mythology, characters and their anecdotes who inhabit the bright contemporary world but who are haunted by a harsher history. And the persona provides the voice of discovery, failed happiness, and reconciliation that establishes the emotional truth of so much of the poetry. It is a poetry not to be missed by travelers familiar with this Mediterranean world and also by those prepared to explore its new access to an imaginary world beyond. --Edmund Keeley

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.