Seth Jani
Poet. Publisher. Interdimensional Vagrant.
field music
FutureCycle Press, 2023
ISBN: 978-1952593369
"Readers should prepare to be pleased and replenished by the unusual in Seth Jani’s Field Music. Among other restoratives, these poems rejuvenate the strangeness of the rain and moon, who here 'is a young ruin / still finding its way through the trees.' Dusks and dragonflies visit Jani’s lines, which travel alongside 'the good ghosts of winds and rivers.' Field Music exists as a dark garden which glints with brilliance and mystery, where a 'paper lantern' is 'released over the dreaming lake' and 'sleepwalkers offer light-rigged prayers.' Poetry like this, which renews the world, is needed immediately, and readers too will find true fuel for renewal in these pages, and more, for these are poems where 'Creeks become shining temples' and 'orchards of wild grass /open in the heart like doors."
-Matt Schumacher
author of Spilling the Moon and Ghost Town Odes
"Seth Jani’s Field Music is a quiet body of poems. Deeply meditative and rooted in a love of the natural world, reading Field Music feels to me like a walk, like wandering through a familiar wood with a thoughtful friend as your guide. In Jani’s poems the human and natural world are revealed to be intimately layered together, as 'we are pinned to a mystery, / mitochondrial, and big as an / extinct language.' Reading this collection, we are taught 'a hard, industrious joy' by 'even the rocks.' We watch in awe as 'the sunflowers crack open / their rattled heads of light.'
The speaker in these poems holds their images softly, turning them in the hand like a jewel, refracting further and further light."
-Millie Tullis,
Psaltery & Lyre