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