Torch the Empty Fields by Mary Jo LoBello Jerome – NWVS #171

While lamenting all we’ve recently lost, the poems collected in Mary Jo LoBello Jerome’s Torch the Empty Fields are themselves fertile with language’s powers: to proclaim, confess, luxuriate, and linger over what we might miss if we’re not paying close enough attention. Phenomena such as “the pulsing tiny body of a ruby/-throated hummingbird, small enough to nest/ in a lichen-lined tablespoon” hop into these poems playfully, colorfully, as if to say look at me, remember my fleeting form. A witness as well as a listener, at turns both irreverent and sweet, Mary LoBello Jerome is truly a poet to watch.

–Ethel Rackin, author of Evening and Crafting Poems and Stories: A Guide to Creative Writing

What good company these poems are. Mary Jo LoBello Jerome shares with us lovely and cherished things: a keepsake stone, a glorious field of tulips, a curl of lemon in a cocktail. When she engages troubling things, she does so with slantwise grace. Above all, she celebrates devotedness and companionship, what it means for people to be near and faithful to each other. We listen to a mother’s final instructions to her daughter. We see a couple setting up their first apartment, older women gathering for a game of cards, a wife in bed with her husband contemplating both spiritual and earthly things. These poems are good friends. Stay with them and visit them often.

–Lynn Levin, author of The Minor Virtues

“The world begins with you,” Mary Jo LoBello Jerome says in Torch the Empty Fields, which borrows from Virgil’s Georgics, a poetic guidebook to bucolic life. The poet deftly braids stories of women like daffodil leaves—from the world-wise speaker, who “search[es] for the mystical everywhere,” to friends, mothers, daughters, even the earth Herself. Jerome’s voice, by turns wry, humble, and reverent, always carries the insight of experience and the subtle flourish of a consummate hand, one able (and one we trust) to deftly lead us from a “grey Dutch sky” to a field of flowers “dazzling and giddy with color,” mere lines later. She asks us “what remains? / What will be remembered?” And we realize the answer—that these poems, seeds sown with skill and care, will bear us succulent fruit for generations.

–Chad Frame, author of Little Black Book.