3 Review(s)

"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."