Author Description

Frances of the Wider Field is about mothers, daughters, time, mortality-the loss of memory and meaning. Van Prooyen's poems have clarity and ferocity, a wild imaginative grace that captures the joy and strangeness of our most intimate and familiar experiences. Frances appears part god, part curious child, part the small solitary voice inside. Van Prooyen asks " Is a sigh a word? Is a body a word? / Is a tongue the beginning?" She tells us "Memory cannot undo the future. Frances, if I said, /tonight I thank the seven sisters, it's really / the blue dust of God between them. Or you."