Man Afield

Man Afield is a lyrical journey through the living world, guided by a backyard naturalist attuned to both wonder and warning. These poems chronicle spiritual and physical excursions into landscapes larger than any one mind or body - places where awe, joy, disorientation, and reckoning intertwine.

Organized in six evocative sections, the collection:

I. bears witness from a seaside deck;

II. wanders through yard and neighboring woods;

III. explores the shifting shoreline;

IV. imagines the vast and restless ocean;

V. surveys the scars of environmental damage;

VI. honors home in its many meanings.

Throughout, the poems dwell in the charged space where humans and the natural world meet. They examine our peculiar paradox: we are the only species that knowingly fouls its own nest - and the only one capable of choosing restraint. With clear-eyed honesty, Man Afield mourns the grinding erosion of precious places while celebrating the stubborn beauty that persists despite us - and sometimes because of us.

From deck to forest trail, from tidal pull to smoke-streaked sky, these poems trace one person's evolving relationship with plants, animals, weather, memory, and spirit. Intimate yet expansive, they invite readers to travel outward into the wild and inward toward belonging.

Man Afield is at once a field journal, a meditation, and a love song - to earth, to home, and to the fragile bond between them.

A "backyard naturalist," Jim Krosschell writes about human relationships with the natural world. His previous books include One Man's Maine and Owls Head Revisited. He has been Board President for Coastal Mountains Land Trust and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and continues to volunteer in conservation and publishing communities. Before retirement, he worked in science publishing in Boston and now lives in Deer Isle, Maine and Newton, Massachusetts. I read Man Afield in one sitting, delighted as the speaker in these poems trains his roving eyes and ears on his surroundings and the wonders of the natural world, searching for any "wildly beating heart." There is no high or low in the cataloguing and noticing that happens here-gnats, ants, many kinds of birds and trees, rivers, oceans, the delicious names of plants all receive attention and care. These poems are clear-eyed, not romantic-they take in the "miles of Walmart, Ford, and Shell" and Land Cruisers "junked on the veldt" and know well how precarious our world is. Krosschell still chooses, again and again, to draw his careful attention to, say, three loons on "this stretch of shore / on the coast of Maine..." and to allow himself, and us, to be mesmerized.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Author of Deke Dangle Dive

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What a satisfying and uplifting ride it is to join Krosschell's journey from young man, "with his dreams of rivers" to old man with his "permanent perch on a hermit's wild ledge," overlooking the forest and coast of Maine, mindful of carbon's engulfing demise, delighting in the "manna of joy administered only in crumbs." From Man Afield's opening flight of poems that expose what's small and barely perceptible, to its closing epics and late-life gatherings, these are poems of a specific, earned grace brought to beauty by Krosschell's firm roots in the natural world. There is lament here for irreparable loss but also humor and social commentary ("Turkeys," "White Man's Footstep"), a retort to Frost ("Whose Woods These Are"), and a brilliant ode of reflection to Thoreau, "March Into April" and its haunting question, "will spring still come to the window and wake me?" Man Afield's poems are grounded in the terra firma of New England, but their reach is universal, and they reward fully with the music of observation.

Bruce Willard, Author of In Light of Stars

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In graceful, accessible language, Jim Krosschell's poems create a glass pane through which to view and ponder the wonders of the natural world and the fraught relationship of humankind to it. Often clear and bright, sometimes dark, and always reflective, these poems reveal a man alive to the world he observes precisely and lovingly, and to which he longs to connect himself and the transcendent. Something we all, in our own way, seek in our lives. Man Afield is a collection that invites us in to learn from one man's journey to our benefit.

Brian Schulz, Poet

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Echoing the luminous attentiveness of Mary Oliver, Jim Krosschell's Man Afield is a poignant work of eco-poetry and reflective verse. Moving from deck to woods to shore, Krosschell situates the human self within a fragile yet resilient natural world. With lyrical precision and moral urgency, he examines beauty, damage, humility, and hope-inviting readers to see humanity not as master, but as one species among many.

Munmun Samanta, Author of Yellow Chrysanthemum