The Circadian Fallacy (Paperback or Softback)

The poems in Circadian Fallacy often begin in quiet observation and bring us to a place in nature or in the human heart where the extraordinary rises from the familiar. Bill Greenfield’s work resonates with an unsentimental, but abiding intimacy that reminds us there is always mystery in the familiar. The time-honored themes of nature, families, youth, social conscience death, and love are well represented in this collection. In Greenfield’s world, there are many opportunities for these themes to converge, and he does so with conviction, irony, humor, and pathos. In citing Shakespeare’s musing that the poet’s life, “… exempt from public haunt finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything,” Greenfield has appropriated a fitting credo for a fine and brilliant collection of poetry.

—William Y. Fellenberg, Yarnslingers Memoir Series and Hudson River Valley Poets

We live in the woods, I thought— “Butterfly Bushes.” Bill Greenfield delights and moves the reader with his varied textured and multi-hued poetry in this wide-screened tableau of life and the intricacies of relationships living in rural Sullivan County, New York. Greenfield paints a gallery of hard-to-forget pictures of characters: “At the Grave of Alfred Bowers,” “Lucy in the Woods, Dying,” ‘Dad’ in “Broken Serve” and experience “Manitoba,” “Autumn Song on the Rail Trail,” “I will Sing to You Tomorrow.” Robert Frost said that “a poem begins with a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” Greenfield lives the truth of this description in The Circadian Fallacy.

—Fr. Bob Phelps, O.F.M. Cap.