Walk the Blue Fields

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These moments, which transform the story from a commonplace observation on the emotional repressions of small-town Catholic secrecy into a wondrous folk tale of magic healing, suggest perhaps that a more fuller, and irrational, existence may be found beyond the limitations of institutionalized religion. Keegan’s poetic prose, spot-on dialogue, and well paced plot twists keep the pages turning through sadness, grief, rage, and compromise.

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

Set in the run-up to Christmas, Small Things Like These follows a coal merchant who finds a young mother locked in a convent coal shed, leaking milk and mourning the loss of her baby. Stack, we are told, always knew that Margaret would leave, but “he couldn’t judge her, not even when she had taken his son’s hand and rowed away with strangers. Unlike Judge, who cannot speak, Martha is transformed in the story into a symbol of the artist who is compelled to speak. The title story paints a variation on this emotional double-blind, this time for a priest officiating at the wedding of a woman with whom he has had a passionate affair.

The innovation that Keegan introduces in Walk the Blue Fields is to recover the mystical aspects of the folk tale at the very moment that Ireland became enthralled to the concrete. If the mother superior’s story is left untold, so is that of the girl found shivering in the coal shed.

Walk the Blue Fields - Claire Keegan - Free Download PDF Walk the Blue Fields - Claire Keegan - Free Download PDF

For this Walk the Blue Fields is a remarkably balanced piece of work, which holds the idea of transition from one state to another, the balance between opportunity and loss. One reason why the Celtic Tiger did not produce a distinctive literature was that finding a form which could ably accommodate the transformations of recent Irish history proved challenging.

The collection unfolds powerfully, with stories that chronicle an isolated young woman’s discovery of seemingly magical powers, incest in a desperate Irish farm family and the disintegration of marriages. When the neighbours come in and ask Martha for a story, she tells them the story of her marriage and the conception of her daughter by the salesman, effectively repeating the story that we have just read. On first reading, Claire Keegan’s 2007 collection Walk the Blue Fields can be made to fit relatively comfortably within the broad continuum of literary naturalism that has been the greater part of Irish short story writing from James Joyce’s Dubliners onwards. Il retrace le contexte culturel, littéraire et historique des nouvelles, suggère que le recueil n’est pas une critique sociale directe de la culture irlandaise, mais peut être lu comme une contribution indirecte à la tradition naturaliste irlandaise, notamment dans la manière dont elle perçoit ce moment historique que fut le Tigre celtique. And I think one of the things that makes reading possible, or pleasurable, is that everybody knows what a day is, whether you’re on a farm in Ireland or at the top of a building in Shanghai.

Walk “Elemental and Plain”: Story-Telling in Claire Keegan’s Walk

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. Her Leaving Cert inability ‘to explain that line about the dancer and the dance’ reflects her own situation, caught between a grotesque inseparability of home and horror.

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. When sunlight reaches the foot of the dressing table, you get up and look through the suitcase again. The author’s own storytelling powers have darkened and matured since her first collection, as she takes confident command of her craft. The folkloric aspects of Walk the Blue Fields occasionally offers a glimpse of more mystical realms, predominantly feminine in character, beyond the rational boundaries of the material world.

Walk the Blue Fields, By Claire Keegan - The Independent Walk the Blue Fields, By Claire Keegan - The Independent

Here is a quick description and cover image of book Walk the Blue Fields written by Claire Keegan which was published in 2007–. And to imagine critics, far in the future, deploying lofty new terms to explain what it is that makes Keegan’s fiction work.

Cet article explore la manière dont la tradition orale populaire et le naturalisme littéraire se mêlent aux nouvelles du recueil de Claire Keegan A travers les champs bleus ( Walk the Blue Fields—2007). The hard reality of "The Parting Gift" requires an equally real plane ticket to the States, whereas the southern gothic of "The Forester's Daughter" can only end in conflagration. They add, using grace, intelligence and an extraordinary ear for rhythm, to the distinguished tradition of the Irish short story. His endless quest to win back the deed from the bank slowly isolates him from others, isolating his resentful wife by proxy. The story is of a superstitious post-menopausal woman, Margaret Flusk, who moves into the house of her dead cousin, a priest, who had impregnated her years ago under a magical quicken (rowan) tree.