Impspired Title

STEVEN

by OSTROWSKI

Steven Ostrowski’s “Life Field” engages us with the secrets of the universe in perception and visualization of our human existence. The poet renders with exacting precision the tender connections of boyhood, fatherhood, personhood, as well as the fierce synergy of artists making Art. The poet dares us to focus on numinous moments in time, to balance the fields of our perceptions, and to excavate our vulnerabilities through the candor of language. Crystallized images beguile us with the confluence and trajectory from where life and Art comingle to awaken the subconscious intellect in us. Ostrowski’s voice is incantatory, lyrical and honest. These bluesy, vibrant poems make us “shiver like the last hotel in the hurricane.” The work masterfully weaves and disturbs the ineluctable truths of the heart, revealing its powers of resiliency and grit. “Life Field” unabashedly took me off the page and into a field of revelry and wonder. Read this book and be transcended. Cynthia Atkins, author of Still-Life With God Life Field, is an extraordinarily rich, wild, exquisite, and at the same time, unbearably heartrending book, a masterful journey through the passageways we must negotiate in our lives. That journey exposes unlikely elegance, distress and pain, confusion and lucidity, love and profound curiosity, a wisdom that is rare and learned. With a brave and steady hand, Steve takes on the wonder of babies, teenaged love, the fierceness and perplexity of adolescence, the slow, torn up road of adulthood, the absolute tenderness and inconceivable reality of growing old. Steve holds nothing back as he confronts the poignancy of love and loss, of the trials and complexities of family and friendships, of the blazingly fleet passage of time. – all written in a language that reads like a cross between English and “English.” There’s the English with which we are familiar. Then there’s the neoteric English that sparkles and blazes on the page, clarifying some point, defining an experience, and expressing it in the only way possible, in a language that is somehow both familiar and at the same time distinctive. We walk with Steve on that extra-fine line between lucidity and abstraction, that place where the music of his poetry is handed off to us. Life Field confronts the grave reality that time is, indeed, blazing past us so fast we don’t even notice it. Life Field is an astonishing accomplishment that you do not want to miss. JOHN L. STANIZZI – POND, Sundowning, Feathers and Bones, SEE Painter, songwriter, teacher, poet and writer Steven Ostrowski braids the many threads of his creative life together in his new collection, Life Field—with poems that serve as invitations to wander into a life, into a deeply-lived, messy, love-filled life. These are intergenerational meditations, poems and prose poems that share from an intimate interior of sweetness and loss, poems that recognize how “We don’t pray,/ don’t believe,// yet we pray.” Just turn to the poem, “Several Human Hearts, a History,” and you’ll discover the light that shines throughout Life Field—then turn to page 1 and begin the journey from the start. Brian Turner (The Wild Delight of Wild Things)