In Joseph Chelius’s engaging Playing Fields, if you ride “the green-and-cream trolley / with wide windows for eyes,” you’ll enter the poet’s life. Lucky you. More importantly, you’ll witness and learn from the histories that fill these pages: relationships, race riots, the pandemic. This is a book that honors wonder and discovery, that teaches compassion and resilience, and that contemplates what to hold onto and what to let go of, whether grief, cornmeal mush, a fly, embarrassment, or a blue bowling ball behind the shed. Filled with rowhouses and music, Playing Fields is a tribute to place, memory, and — of course — baseball.

—Marjorie Maddox, author, Small Earthly Space

Each poem in Playing Fields summons a world that is fully present in the moment. Everyday phenomena — a bowling ball, a “repurposed” lawnmower, squirrels and songbirds, a plaid thermos, a damaged tree — become the poet’s brothers and sisters, merit his care and concern. In “Super 8,” Chelius, channeling Edward Hopper, wonders of a stranger: “lonely or merely alone, / who’d presume to say?” Indeed, there is a vital kinship between a Chelius poem and a Hopper painting. Here, a child at play is not lonely because the game’s world has come alive, drawn close. In this regard, each of Joe Chelius’s poems is a “playing field.” As we read, magically, we enter that field with him.

—Terence Culleton, author, A Tree and Gone

Like the moves of a skillful athlete, Chelius’s craft in Playing Fields feels easeful and natural — for he is a master of metaphor and resonant detail. Each scene is rendered with clarity and a “sprig of tenderness” that does not deny difficulties. They “never judge or accuse,” providing us oft-needed “lessons in civility.” Chelius owns an acute sense of what the characters and objects in our lives signify to us, whether it be Hank Aaron giving his young fans “an obliging wave” before settling into position or a dismantled swing set in the back yard. Warmed by their maker’s humane sensibility, these poems help us find what we may have overlooked or never thought worthy of notice.

—Luray Gross, author, With This Body

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Playing Fields

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