The Collected Poetry and Prose of Lawrence Fixel
Ah, the prose poem, thought by the unsuspecting to be less challenging than poetry’s other forms. But no: prose requires rare insight, imagination, and writing at its highest level. In the twentieth century, no one outperformed Lawrence Fixel.
The Place/The Name/The Child
Get there if you can and see the land you once were proud to own.
—W.H. Auden
Childhood: another country. She remember the extraordinary size of an ordinary
summer—the extended days dissolving into nights without number: a time with-
out boundaries—and how suddenly it ended one morning with her mother’s voice
saying, “Time for school.” All the strangeness of leaving the house—breaking one
connection, as it were, before making another—and walking toward the school. The
incredible distance that stretched out before her, block after block … But when
she returns as an adult, walks those few blocks—so ordinary and compact—she
wonders: How could it be? The question brings other reminders of her changed size
and Status. There was the drawing she did one day in class: her parents seated at a
round table, not looking at each other. On the back of the drawing—on an impulse
she had scribbled these words: “When we grow bigger, adults grow smaller.”
Reviewed by
Matt Sutherland
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