Something Snake-Like and other poems

A boy in an African garden stares directly into the sun and never quite recovers. Years later he is a father in a Polish forest, lying down among pagan stones to listen for the drums beneath the soil.

Between those two moments: a missionary childhood undone by Ecclesiastes at nine; an England assembled from VHS tapes and comic annuals, then found empty on arrival; a school portrait of Hitler hung in a dining room on the wrong Sunday; a chained Prometheus explaining that the fire he stole was never fire at all.

Something Snake-Like is S.M. Field’s second collection – songs of innocence and experience for the exile and the apostate. Field writes fatherhood, marriage and middle age with the same unsparing eye he turns on god, England and the fragile china of inherited masculinity, and finds the sacred where it has no business being: a Rembrandt in a crowded gallery, a fountain in Wrocław, a stranger meeting the sea for the first time before he dies.