Greenfields

A lyrical document of growing up in a quiet but fast-changing corner of Scotland caught at various stages in the last decades of the twentieth century. As with the acclaimed "Lucky Day", this collection is particularly sensitive to the nuances of family relationships.

"Greenfields" is a lyrical document of growing up in a quiet but fast-changing corner of Scotland caught at various stages in the last decades of the twentieth century. This collection reclaims suburbia - "the rurban" as Price prefers to call it - as a place of unexpected poetry. Alive to the downsides of "dormitory towns", "Greenfields" evokes the bittersweet qualities of places that are neither quite urban nor quite rural but have in fact a fascinating hybridity, even beauty. As with the acclaimed "Lucky Day", this collection is particularly sensitive to the nuances of family relationships, but new here is an uncanny evocation of a child's developing perspective of friends, siblings and parents. The theme of a modern territory superimposed onto a much older one, hinted at in "Lucky Day", is more fully developed now as Price elegises the ancient landscape of the little-known county of Renfrewshire, southwest of Glasgow. Several kinds of time - geological, dynastic, family, and lovers' time - are set against the rapacious speed of modernity as construction and telecoms transform whole ways of life. Price is also confirmed in this book as a love poet of great delicacy. In the sequence that braids many of his concerns together, Tube Shelter Perspective, he demonstrates that he is a writer, in the words of John Kinsella, who "has given late modernism an injection of humanity it has long required."