Representing nearly a quarter-century of published work, "Carrying Water to the Field" attests to Joyce Sutphen's accomplishment as a lyric poet dedicated to clarity and concision. In his introduction, Ted Kooser describes the book as "a collection of moments that may feel quite familiar to you." But the poems — rooted in physical description and the rhythms of manual labor — have more heft and materiality than a fleeting moment. Instead, the book feels like a bowl of pebbles harvested over years of country rambles. The reader can dip in, selecting one perfectly crafted poem at a time and relish the weight and feel of each in their palm.

Sutphen has been Minnesota's poet laureate since 2011, a natural choice given that she grounds most of her work in the landscape of rural Minnesota. In a poem from her 1995 debut, "Straight Out of View," she writes of the prairies: "That is not the country for poetry. … Yet I knew it to be passionate." In the seven collections that follow, she proves that Minnesota clearly is the country for poetry, a place to witness clouds "rubbing their dark/knuckles over the yellow dunes" and listen for "five kinds of birdsong/threaded through the air."

Carrying Water to the Field by Joyce Sutphen
Carrying Water to the Field by Joyce Sutphen

Her careful, clear observations capture the particularities of growing up on a farm outside St. Joseph and the sensual pleasures of the work there: baling sun-warmed hay, riding a well-made tractor or filling the kitchen with the smell of baking apples. These acts are plain and profound, leaving the speaker "certain that my simple belief/in the light/would be enough." Sutphen connects the labor of the farm with her labor as a poet. Working the land with her grandmother taught her "to love a well-honed thing" such as a hoe or a crafted sonnet.

This love extends to the people contained within "the circle that makes a farm." She writes poems celebrating and honoring her father, aunts, mother and "the grandmother who lost three of those/thirteen, who hung a million baskets of wash." In a way, her lucid descriptions are a memorial to her sister, who urges her even after death "to love the things of this world —/the white pines, the sumac, flowers."

"Carrying the Water to the Field" not only follows Sutphen's poetic journey, but is also a record of a life. The vibrant and heroic father of early collections appears in later poems doing the "brutal, bruising, back-/breaking chore" of dying, the speaker returns to images of a body in the process of aging, and a couple "counted up years in children/and marriages."

While these poems take readers through transformation and loss, they also linger on what persists in moments of grace, such as the blade of a scythe left behind by a mower "distracted/by something sweeter than fact or fire" or the silence of the dead "that I take/for love — a love that I carry/all the way to the horizon."

Carrying Water to the Field By: Joyce Sutphen. Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 240 pages, $19.95. Event: 7 p.m. Oct. 1, Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Snelling Av., St. Paul.

Elizabeth Hoover is a Milwaukee-based poet.