"America is hard to see," observed Robert Frost, for America never stops moving, speeding always toward the promise of a future that is elusive, if not illusory. The American is a wayfarer who knows no rest, who is almost pathologically agitated. The American soul, restive and turbulent, finds its being in perpetual motion. There is no staying put, no sending down roots deep into the soil. Rather, there is in America, wrote D. H. Lawrence, only "the incarnate mystery of the open road." "Dark Fields: Poems and an Essay" offers a more chastened, and chastening, vision of the American past and present, emphasizing deliberation, restraint, forbearance, and responsibility in place of the exuberant feeling and ecstatic sensation that accompanies an America that is moving "forward then and now and forever." Standing within, but also in critical opposition to, the poetic tradition that Walt Whitman established, the poems in this volume question the American hope of millennial perfection. An expression of dissent, they counter the official American optimism, and instead cast doubt on the conviction that America is the City of God and that Americans are His Chosen People.
