Greenfields

Price Richard

Greenfields shows how it was, to grow up in a quiet corner of Scotland, fixing the last decades of the twentieth century in its snapshots. The book reclaims suburbia as a place of unexpected poetry and conjures the bittersweet of such hybrid places. Those modern places are superimposed upon much older contours: Price elegises the ancient landscape of Renfrewshire. Geological, dynastic, family, and lovers' time are set against the rapacious speed of modernity.

Like "Lucky Day", Price's acclaimed Carcanet collection, Greenfields is alert to the nuances of family relationships. New here are delicate love poems and uncanny evocations of a child's developing perception of friends, siblings and parents. In "Tube Shelter Perspective", the sequence that binds together many of his concerns, Price 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".

About the Author

Richard Price was born in 1966 and grew up in Scotland. He trained as a journalist at Napier College, Edinburgh, before studying English at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. The youngest of the Informationist group of poets, he was a founder of the magazines associated with them, "Gairfish and Southfields". He is also the co-founder of Vennel Press, the imprint which brought many of the earlier Informationist collections to a wider audience. He is now Head of Content and Research Strategy at the British Library, London.

Reviews

"Price's humane intelligence manifests itself in deceptively simple and subtly musical forms of address. Readers who allow themselves the pleasure will not be disappointed" – Robert Potts, The Guardian

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