Field Notes of a Flaneur

With a Foreword by Ellen Doré Watson Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize Selected by Jon Thompson Free Verse Editions Series Editor: Jon Thompson This wonderful collection bears witness to a rare engagement with the world. An acute observer, Meyers sees, not more than others, but other than others. His piercing perceptions are so often slant in the best Dickinson tradition. A truly post-modern flaneur, he has abandoned the detachment of the 19th-century figure, adopting instead a wry, quirky compassion deeply committed to the daily in all its detail. -Cole Swensen, author of Art in Time What a marvel of observation and metaphor Field Notes of a Flaneur is! And what brilliant company is Lewis Meyers, sauntering through these poems with delighted intelligence, anxiety, wit, and tenderness. Here, August arrives "with morning glories / between its teeth"; here, the sky turns its back on us and lightning is "its coat" split "along the middle seam"; here, a child "is as crisp and fresh / as a new pair of pants." These surprising poems recollect the best work of Bert Meyers or Louise Glück, but they are also utterly their own. I'm thrilled to have come across a poet of such genius and insight. -Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears In these shrewd poems, Lewis Meyers ranges from sly understatement -- "Wind bends the tree. I couldn't do that."- to rapt declaration- "The swimmers . . . were there in the flesh and were/beautiful, which is the most real." Meyers has a hand in poems that create fabulist concoctions as well as tender, unlikely elegies. His moral clarity appears again and again in poignant and astonishing variety. Either because of or despite the hard truths he reveals, Meyers is a poet in love with an imperfect world. -Barbara Ras, author of The Blues of Heaven Lewis Meyers (1934-2020) lived a capacious life dedicated to art, music, teaching, and politics-but his true love was poetry. As a graduate student studying with Donald Hall, he published in such august journals as Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, and Hudson Review. But after these early successes, he gave little energy to seeking recognition. During his years teaching in the English Department at Hunter College (1970-2008), he continued writing poems but seldom submitted them. Several did appear, however-Field, Antioch Review, and Literary Review. After he retired from teaching in 2008, he dedicated himself exclusively to writing poems. Echoing Joan Mitchell's characterization of the place of painting in her life, he called writing poems an "addiction." So central was poetry to Meyers's life that when he learned he had a fatal disease, he told his wife how he felt about it by handing her a book of W. S. Merwin's translations open to an anonymous Egyptian poem from the twentieth century BCE, which begins, "Death is before me today." He died on December 28, 2020. Since his death, his wife has honored his request to publish his best work by placing eleven poems in Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, Five Points, Hudson Review, Massachusetts Review, Plume, and Arkansas International.