Field Days edited by Angela King and Susan Clifford, Green Books,
拢7.95, ISBN 1870098730
AS agriculture gives way to agribusiness, a new environmental consciousness
has taken root. For the first time in history, significant swathes of the
populace in Europe and North America regard fields, in all their diversity, as
places of beauty. And more and more people want to keep them that way.
Clues lurk in ancient burial barrows, ridge and furrow and lost villages.
Signs of past climate change lie buried deep in ponds or peat. What
conservationists call 鈥渟mall elements in the landscape鈥濃�攑onds, ditches,
hedgerows and stone walls鈥攁re teaming with species. Fields are home to all
these and more. Far more than any other aspect of the landscape, fields enable
us humans to feel at home in the world. But why?
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Where better to look for an answer than Field Days, the world鈥檚
first anthology of poems about fields, collected by the environmental charity
Common Ground.
About 130 poems from British and American writers offer a glimpse
of the significance of fields in contemporary life. 鈥淎s one of our oldest
inventions, fields offer thousands of years of testimony to the manifold pacts
we are capable of making with nature, 鈥� says Angela King, co-editor of the
anthology. They exemplify 鈥渢he most sophisticated mutuality between nature and
culture which we are capable of creating and sustaining鈥�.
The poets they choose tap into our imagination鈥攅ven the titles of their
verse intrigue: Alice Oswald鈥檚 The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile and
Woman in a Mustard Field, for instance, or Ivor Gurney鈥檚
Brown Earth Look, and David Hart鈥檚 Naming the Fields.
We value fields for their history, this poetry helps us to understand. But
their liminal status as part-human, part-natural, also draws us close. Fields
are 鈥渉alfway between now and then, between the made and the given, between the
local and abstract,鈥� says Adam Nicolson, writer and Sussex farmer, in his
preface to Field Days.
鈥淭he essence of a field is that the cultural accommodates the natural there,鈥�
Nicolson argues. In the ideal condition, a partnership is maintained: 鈥淭he human
being makes room for and makes use of those organisms that are not him鈥� without
attempting utterly to destroy all that is useless or bothersome. Fields 鈥渂elong
to us, but there are things beyond us in them鈥�. We think of fields as good
places precisely because 鈥渨e are neither alien nor omnipotent there鈥�, Nicolson
argues.
鈥淣o sprinkling of bright weeds,鈥� laments poet Geoffrey Grigson in Field
Days, 鈥渘ow that the men of straw are men of plastic鈥�, answers Fleur Adcock
in her Turnip-heads.
Poetry may seem a strange place to start a grassroots revolution, but then
words are unpredictable beasts. We in the West may yet rediscover the wisdom of
the fields, with the help of a verse or two.