Walk the Blue Fields - Dark Publications

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife. He finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone. A Harvard student flies south to celebrate his birthday at his step-father's condominium by the sea. While the scent of hay drifts up from neighbouring fields, a teenage immigrant articulates the reason for her going. And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, all that wedding day, with his memories of a love affair. In her long-awaited second collection, Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past, and it is against this landscape that the stories of Walk the Blue Fields so beautifully articulate all the yearnings of the human heart.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars

adult Irish Stories July 22, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

No Leprechauns here. Ms Keegan writes marvelous short stories that are beautifully written and deal with serious themes

2 out of 5 stars

Disturbing Short Stories July 26, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful

I have been to Ireland many, many times. My parents were born in Belfast. I believe all these stores are true. I just did not care for the book. All the stories had a sadness or inappropriate sexual undertone. Couldn't the author write about GOOD stuff. There's alot of good in Ireland also. The book felt creepy. It did not live up to the great review it had in the Wall Street Journal

5 out of 5 stars

Beautiful telling of sorrowful tales September 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I was captivated by each story in Blue Fields. Claire Keegan has a rare and spare voice that manages to convey the sadness of the soul, the treacherous waters called love, the messy interconnectivity of human life as played out in rural Ireland. She recognizes also that resolution and redemption often escape our desperate attempts to find peace. I loved the book and recommend it highly, but be advised that these are not your Irish barstool yarns.

4 out of 5 stars

Brooding Parables of Modern Ireland October 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I suppose the first thing that comes to mind when I think of these short stories is that they have a strange relevance to today's uncertain world where the personal quests for economic, romantic and psychological security are ultimately doomed to failure.

The consistent theme weaving through these stories is that of a past that haunts the characters and is their ball and chain into the present and future. The stories revolve around familiar Irish subjects: shamed priests, writers, quirky women condemned as whores, and bored and destitute farmers.

The "Night of the Quicken Trees" combines most of these subjects and is the most compelling story in the book. It takes place on a wind swept plot of land overlooking the Cliffs of Moher, the last bit of Ireland until the Arran Islands. Steeped in mysticism, this tale involves Margaret's humorous and semi-tragic race against time to have a child to replace the baby she lost from crib death. Her decision to leave her home with her child and seek a safe haven from life's threats in the Arran Islands is the most spiritual and redemptive moment in the collection of stories.

"Irish Gothic" is how I would best describe the short stories. If Flannery O'Connor were still alive and visited modern Ireland, I think her reflections would be similar.

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