In Lands Imagination Favors

In his superb new volume, Don Schofield deepens into loss of love and language, of history and home. The greatest thing s to leave no mark at all, he affirms, yet longing draws us to moments when nothing matters but the curve / of one body in the hollow of another. The questions Schofield poses Where do the lost words go? and how many // blessings do I need? echo across the distances between lovers, between countries. In Lands Imagination Favors reverberates with such exquisite and ineffable uncertainties. --Michael Waters A stunning collection Don Schofield s poetry, his sensibility, has traveled through two cultures to make itself. As a result, the poems are unusually rich, vibrant with the personal losses, direct in the articulation of the pleasures of the journey. --Dennis Schmitz As the title of one of these poems suggests, a major focus here is traveling Greece, but the modes for doing so are original, highly evocative, at the end profoundly moving. The landscape is chosen to offer color through details that are both recognizable and metaphoric, places that carry a name familiar to those who celebrate the life of the senses but who are also transported to the land of mythology, characters and their anecdotes who inhabit the bright contemporary world but who are haunted by a harsher history. And the persona provides the voice of discovery, failed happiness, and reconciliation that establishes the emotional truth of so much of the poetry. It is a poetry not to be missed by travelers familiar with this Mediterranean world and also by those prepared to explore its new access to an imaginary world beyond. --Edmund Keeley