When I read this, I see the “you” from the opening to be the poem’s speaker addressing a scarecrow, giving it advice. Take a swim beyond the dusty chambers of summer Consider the opening to “it would be better if you tasted rain”: There is this odd collective centering of perspective. I’m not sure how I would describe the final effect. There are times when a single poem could shift easily from one pronoun to another. There are poems in which the scarecrow feels like a population of scarecrows. In some poems, “scarecrow” is an expressive persona, told sometimes in the singular, sometimes in the plural. The poem could refer to the scarecrow in either third person or second person. One of the pleasures of the book is personally reckoning with Fernandez’s handling of the “scarecrow.” It could represent the trope of a scarecrow. Who or what is this scarecrow? It’s not really the speaker, though there are moments when the speaker shows a familiarity with the scarecrow (“Scarecrow, we are two of a kind”). For my reading, the poems in Scarecrow should be viewed via a conceptual scarecrow figure that resides within the poems. It uses a densely considered, sometimes bare, often elliptical, but always emotional frame. How, then, to reconcile the two poles? They seem like opposites, but as deep, earnest reckonings, they are both reasonable responses to a confounding and bewildering world.įernandez’s third book, Scarecrow, continues that reckoning. At the other pole, there is the supersaturated and emotive voice of Pink Reef. Fernandez poses an intellectual, referential voice that is continually confounding a consistent line of thought. At one end, Fernandez’s first book We Are Pharaoh is a charged density, a voice echoing up a brain’s deep crevices.

Perhaps you have identified two poles in Fernandez’s work: the opaque, filigreed voice of We Are Pharaoh (Canarium Books, 2011) and the drenched sentimentality of Pink Reef (Canarium Books, 2013). Perhaps you are already a reader of Robert Fernandez, or you have been in the past.

The poet and the scarecrow