Product Description

Near the heart of our understanding of nature lies the mosaic of fields and meadows. It should not surprise us that their significance, essential qualities and changing character through time and the seasons are celebrated by the voices of poets. Now, when fields - the unwritten history of our relationship with the land - are under persistent attack from development, agrochemicals and genetic engineering, poetry raises questions about the real partnership between humankind and nature that fields represent. This anthology brings together the work of more than 90 poets, ancient and modern, including Wendell Berry, John Betjeman, John Burnside, Helen Dunmore, Ivor Gurney, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Jennings, John Keats, Alice Oswald, Kathleen Raine and Walt Whitman.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #406020 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Excerpted from Field Days: an Anthology of Poetry by Common Ground, Angela King, Susan Clifford, Adam Nicolson. Copyright © 1998. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Preface Perhaps we should have anticipated the richness we have found, for fields are one of our oldest inventions: they offer thousands of years of testimony to hard work and manifold pacts we are capable of making with nature. Having created the anthology Trees Be Company in 1989, we imagined that poetry about fields would be harder to find-this has not proved so.

Many of us associate fields with childhood memories of nature at its most generous and resplendent-the cultural fashioning of these enclosures, its gentle dynamism, helped nature, over centuries, to build richness and particularity with us.

The speed, scale and purposes of change over the last two generations has changed everything. The impatience for every inch to produce a crop of cash in the shortest time, with the fashions for chemical and intensive agriculture, have demonized domestic animals, homogenized landscape, ousted wild life and stripped farmers of their own history in the land. Hostile takeovers of 'green field sites' by development of all kinds fail to give value to the significance and meaning which fields have for us, in their crude equations of cost and benefit.

And yet, fields can exemplify the most sophisticated mutuality between nature and culture which we are capable of creating and sustaining. We need to extend that understanding, continuity and conscious care which the best of them represent. Shaming statistics-only 3% of hay meadows, pastoral jewels in the crown, have survived since 1975, and skylarks have plummeted by 58% in 25 years-should not have the last word.

Common Ground's work has tried to weave disparate strands into a broadloom of argument to refocus debate on the integrity of our relations with the land in our Manifesto for Fields.

And this collection of poetry is another kind of manifesto-it offers a glimpse into the deep relationships which we are capable of making between the cultural and natural world, and stands as further testimony from the many who do care, to the rest of us who must add action to words. Angela King & Sue Clifford Common Ground, July 1998