Walk the Blue Fields

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From the perspective of cultural vitality, in such moments of upheaval often the challenge for artists, as it was for W. Eoghan Smith, « “Elemental and Plain”: Story-Telling in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields», Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 63|Autumn 2014, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2016, consulté le 01 novembre 2023.

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan | PopMatters Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan | PopMatters

Keegan has mastered an understanding of the Irish people that she fillets into myriad characters of all sorts. An endearing romance of a kind, ‘Night of the Quicken Trees’ traces the tentative relationship between Margaret, a healer, and Stack, a bedraggled turf-man with no one but Josephine, his goat, for company. It’s as though Keegan can only catch her characters for long enough to find material for short pieces. Frank O’Connor famously wrote in his study of the short story that “always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society…as a result there is in the short story…an intense awareness of human loneliness” (19).Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize, awarded to the best collection of stories published in the British Isles.

Walk The Blue Fields – The Stinging Fly

Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. A priest might seem an anachronistic figure, but the respects (and disrespects) paid to the character represent a rural Ireland which still exists today. As in “The Forester’s Daughter,” everyone knows the truth, but none will speak it directly: “we all know the white cloth is aisy stained” remarks one of the wedding guests snidely to the priest (46). Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. The neighbours who come to listen to Martha are often so disturbed by her stories that her husband has to often drive them home.Enfin, il montre en quoi la promesse d’une transformation personnelle, culturelle et sociale dote le recueil d’un sens esthétique. For all of this, however, it is the brilliantly rendered dinner scene which makes ‘Walk the Blue Fields’ one of the gems of this collection, particularly in terms of the interplay among the wedding guests and in lines such as ‘the priest cuts into the lamb’, which betray a knowing irony in light of the character’s inability to uphold his oath of celibacy. Immaculate structure, a lovely, easy flow of language, and a certain stony-eyed realism about human experience; she is very much part of an Irish tradition, but a unique craftswoman for all that. It used to be an open room at the top of the stairs but Eugene put an end to all of that, got the carpenters in and the partition built, installed the door. He thought of her daily kindnesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life.

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan | Goodreads

As with Antarctica, it is the rich psychological realism of Keegan’s characters which propels these stories beyond simple aesthetic splendour. Deegan admits to himself he has always known about the girl and he stops going to mass, because there is no sense in keeping up the pretence. Breathlessly acclaimed in Britain, America, and here at home, Claire Keegan has already achieved the kind of rapturous critical praise which is usually only afforded to established literary giants.In the last story, "Night of the Quicken Trees", Keegan sends a flock of ostriches down the street to remind us either that Ireland is changing, or that we are not reading about Ireland after all, but about that distinctive place where her fiction exists; her own country. She continues her outstanding work with this new collection of quietly wrenching stories of despair and desire in modern-day Ireland. The two foremost contemporary masters of the [short story] form, Alistair MacLeod and John McGahern, know that tradition can live even in the lament for its passing . Writing in a striking, Celtic-slanted prose, Keegan exposes the hearts, hopes and dreams of those in the Irish countryside.