Walk the Blue Fields

Product Information

And yet, there is perhaps some offering of hope here: in speaking her name, the priest has, as if in confession, purged himself of guilt.

Walk the blue fields : Keegan, Claire : Free Download, Borrow Walk the blue fields : Keegan, Claire : Free Download, Borrow

As a folk story of Ireland in the early twenty-first century, “Night of the Quicken Trees” carries tremendous cultural resonance, because the wondrous is absorbed into the naturalist tradition as a cultural peculiarity, and its once-imagined spiritual power potentially disentitled. Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan is the long awaited second collection from the Booker-shortlisted author of Small Things Like These. They tell of harsh, lonely lives, alleviated by drink or dreams, in a voice that is lyrical, thoughtful, but with a thick, dark strain of melancholy running through it. Foster is a gentle yarn about a small girl who is thrown upon the kindness of strangers while her mother gives birth to yet another baby. And here another parallel can be drawn which emphasizes the importance of narrative as the recuperation of truth in Keegan: those who tell their stories in this collection are often a contemporary form of the traditional Gaelic story-teller, the seanchaí, the holder of folklore who told unlikely, mythical tales that both reminded a community of their collective identity and challenged the boundaries of belief.That decade and the first part of the 2000s were years that saw a series of social and political transformations occur, such as increased secularization, social and legislative liberalization, economic prosperity, sustained net inward migration for the first time since the end of the colonial plantations in the seventeenth century, and closer EU integration.

Walk the Blue Fields Download [PDF] [EPUB] Walk the Blue Fields Download

Yet just as these modes of narration—the folk tale and the short story—are not in competition with each other, so too are the mythical and the material conjoined as the sum total of existential possibility.As Joe Cleary has explained, if twentieth-century Irish writing was notably de-energized, it is because the intellectual conditions of twentieth-century Ireland were inhospitable to the continued flourishing of modernism.

Walk the Blue Fields | Grove Atlantic

Perhaps, in a book full of bad male authority, she needs McGahern's benign authority to give her a place to stand. A sparrow swoops down onto the window ledge and pecks at his reflection, his beak striking the glass .

The final scenes in the story are of the “simpleton” burning down a model of the family house that he has been building, which in turn set fire to the actual family home. And in “Dark Horses,” a man seeks solace at the bottom of a bottle as he mourns both his empty life and his lost love. But her writing also draws on a pre-Joycean version of the Irish short story tradition that traces its origins to the Gaelic oral folk tale. In stories brimming with Gothic shadows and ancient hurts, Claire Keegan tells of “a rural world of silent men and wild women who, for the most part, make bad marriages, and vivid, uncomprehending children” (Anne Enright, The Guardian).