The Infinite Field Poems by Alice Templeton

Written at the crossroads of reverie and history, Alice Templeton’s poems are at turns both elegiac and jubilant as they move through the rural and urban landscapes of Tennessee and California. Muscadine vines, loosestrife, hobblebush, and California jasmine punctuate these deftly revealed pastorals. The Infinite Field is slow poetry at its best. Fully embodied, the poet returns home and takes her final leave, reminding us that we are “slips of the sequential tongue, confounding our biographies.”

—Rebecca Black, author of Cottonlandia

Alice Templeton’s poems in The Infinite Field possess a dreamlike beauty, haunted—or I should say inhabited—by memories of childhood, family, spiritual community, and the culverts, creeks, and rivers of Tennessee. I think of these poems as quilts, arrangements of the remnants of the past put into fresh and surprising combinations: No matter where they go, they carry the texture and warmth of home.

—D. A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys

Intimate and engaging, these poems by Alice Templeton hold the reader with sure lines that never get fussy, never spill over aesthetically or emotionally. If the “air has grown rare and precise,” so has the body of American poetry, enriched by these classic verses. Templeton's varied lyrics are companions

we can carry with us to remind us of what poetry at its best can be.

—Marilyn Kallet, author of Even When We Sleep

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Writing from her “share of solitude,” Alice Templeton calls up beloved places and people from the infinite field of memory: the Memphis suburbs of her childhood, the family farm in middle Tennessee that grounded her in adolescence and adulthood, and the relatives with whom she shared those places. Templeton’s language conjures “the hour creatures draw close,” and within the bounds of these singular poems, time is given shape and substance. The decline of her parents and the destruction of the family home by fire compel her to reinspect the past and fully claim her present life in California. Taken together, these poems tell a loving liberation story as the poet moves on from a way of life spent close to the land.   

Binding: Perfect-bound paperback 

Press run: 500 copies 

Price: $18 

Page count: 112 

Publication date: April 2, 2024 

ISBN: 978-1-939639-42-4 

Distributor: Small Press Distribution