"These wonderful poems offer a rare mix of the highest lyric craft in the service of a compelling, persuasive human voice. Again and again here, clear language and powerful music bring the reader into a world which is full of reflection, doubt, the pain of memory, and the exuberance of daily living. What is remarkable is the way superb craftsmanship always succeeds in making these poems a delight to read, while at the same time deep feeling never fails to make them memorable."

Eavan Boland

“The title provides the book’s best description: classic in its forms, rough in its fierce (and very successful) ambition, and most certainly new.”

Library Journal

"The several dozen sonnets and sonnet-like contraptions in the book are scholarly, scattered, and have a touch of both kinds of madness. They are aware of each other in a way you rarely see in collections and quickly invite comparison to John Berryman’s Dream Songs: like Berryman, Fields succeeds in making his thumb-twiddling and psychic ambling worth your while, and, like the Dream Songs, Classic Rough News appears formally loose while being quite the opposite. . . .Fields’s black humor is that of an utterly undeceived and persevering man, and, improbably, the crusty, battered cynic behind all this puppetry emerges as lovable."

Poetry | D. H. Tracy

"Though the material is sad, the poems have the bracing, redeeming and even exhilarating effect that comes from precision....The art of the poem, including its iambic pentameter, is kept quiet in a way that emphasizes the banality of ruin. This is the voice of misery, in the verse measure of John Milton and William Wordsworth, and the colloquial sureness of excellent detective fiction....

It’s notable that these poems are clear without being judgmental....The poet’s art, by being so closely attentive, is generous to its desperate characters."

Robert Pinsky | Washington Post