With a half-dozen books of poetry published to date, Kenneth Fields distills some forty years of teaching and writing about poetry into" Classic Rough News," a collection of fresh sonnets and sonnet-like lyrics that attests to both Fields's skills as a writer and the inexhaustible possibilities of the form.
"Classic Rough News" follows a skeptical, cosmopolitan, intelligent, poetic presence aware that its carefully constructed veneer could crumble at any moment. In poems that mine interior dialogue for the discovery of great truths, Fields conveys feelings of awkwardness, incompleteness,...