Whole Field Still Moving Inside It, The

About Molly Bashaw

Molly Bashaw grew up on small farms in Massachusetts, upstate New York, and Vermont. She studied at the Eastman School of Music before working for twelve years in Germany as a professional bass-trombonist. In 2012-13 she served as the George Bennett Fellow writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. Her poetry has been awarded the Lynda Hull Memorial Prize and the River Styx International Poetry Prize.

Praise for The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It

To say that Molly Bashaw has written a book inhabiting the most gritty details of farm life is like saying that Melville wrote the best-ever book about whaling: it’s true, but the result of her inhabitation—“I have drunk ice-cold water from a trough. / I have taken a cow’s teat into my mouth”—is not reportage but myth-making of the highest imaginative level. The poems feel simultaneously earth-bound and surreal, most convincingly worldly when their language is most exquisitely unhinged. Molly Bashaw is an artist of the American sublime: greet her at the beginning of a great career.
—James Longenbach

The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It is a pastoral paean and elegy grounded in two classic American narratives: the disappearance of the family farm and the young adventurer forsaking the farm for the wider world. Molly Bashaw invokes her literary and artistic forebears—Frost, Andrew Wyeth, Chagall, John Clare, the Virgil of the Georgics—, deploying the wonderfully specific vocabulary of farm life to recreate its texture in the rhythms and repetitions of her poems, which seem to emerge directly from a child’s intoxication with the physical substance of both language and the living earth. The further we read, the more deeply we understand her assertion that “the farm is everywhere, a constellation.”
—Lee Sharkey, author of Calendars of Fire