The Fair Fields

"Flashing slivers of a life drawn together like precious filings to a magnet. Yet there are order, insight, purpose, and beauty in Rosanna Warren’s rumination. The multiple astonishments of her art, poetry, and life story itself are fully honored by this book, as is its every lucky reader. The magnet is the writing." -- James Carroll, author of The Cloister
"I love the way Rosanna Warren catapults us back into the lost world of her childhood and adolescence and then lets the story of her parents, who they were, slowly seep into her consciousness—and ours. I hope this smart, canny, preternaturally observant story of dawning awareness, of falling from timelessness into time, into history, and entering language becomes a fixture of contemporary American literature." -- Edward Hirsch, author of My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, A Skokie Elegy
"I loved this tender memoir, uncompromising in its honesty, devastating yet restrained, and on whose pages poetry itself comes to life." -- Alice Kaplan, author of Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris
"The Fair Fields is something moving and unique: a memoir with a clear double focus on both the author’s inner life and on the outer lives of family, culture, and nation in their fraught passage from the 1960s to the present day, and from Rosanna Warren’s childhood home in Fairfield to (in Piers Plowman’s phrase) ‘the fair field full of folk,’ the world in which the folk range from appallingly foul to inspiringly fair." -- Edward Mendelson, author of The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway
"Vivid, lyrical, mesmerizing, The Fair Fields is the best kind of poet’s memoir: each word, alive, brings worlds to life. Rosanna Warren’s indelible evocation of her extraordinary youth is at once delightful and deeply moving." -- Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History
"Daughter of great American writers, Rosanna Warren was a young painter who occasionally published poems when, despite lifelong resistance to following her parents into literature, she found her home within the ‘hard language’ of poetry. The Fair Fields is an engrossing, beautiful, and inspiring read that recalls Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. I love this book." -- Honor Moore, author of A Termination
"This collection of autobiographical essays turns into an utterly original exploration of the mysterious ways one becomes who one is. It takes a poet as subtle as Rosanna Warren to re-create the magic of the world of a curious child, who under the tender guidance of her parents, discovers other traditions, other languages, other landscapes. But Rosanna Warren is a poet very much attuned to the world around her and the political tumult of the sixties makes its way in the resurgence of memories. This look on the forming of a personality, on the transformation of a malleable little girl into an independent young adult is autobiography at its best." -- Anka Muhlstein, author of Camille Pissarro: The Audacity of Impressionism
"Among the best portraits of an artist coming of age I have ever read . . . Rich in ideas about art, poetry, and history, [The Fair Fields] reads at times like a love letter to her parents and their circle, which included some of the most esteemed artists and thinkers of their time. It invites us, if we dare, to compare that vanished world’s intellectual ideals and sense of artistic purpose with our own." -- Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend
"The poet Rosanna Warren has crafted a memoir/collection of evocative stories that does not trade on but also does not avoid the ‘force field of fame’ surrounding her writer parents. It includes international adventure, the discovery of a dramatic love affair, exquisite poetry by others, acute attention to nature, and the finding of her own voice." -- Jean Strouse, author of Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers
"A wonder of autobiography, bright-hearted and mined from the glorious mid-century of American civilization. Rosanna Warren’s extraordinary parentage, cosmopolitan ease, and artistic grit make for an exemplary tale. She is above all grateful for the luck—and peril—of having been herself, a gratefulness her readers will abundantly share. Here is prose that can take your breath away. Chapeau!" -- Benjamin Taylor, author of Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather