Four Fields
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:28th Aug '14
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
One of the very best of the new nature writers meditates on the relationship between man and grass by looking at four real fields in four different continents Shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize
Four fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and their natural and human histories. Four real fields - walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable and knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested and changing. This book tells the story of four green fields.
In his first book since the acclaimed The Running Sky Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields. Four fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and their natural and human histories. Four real fields – walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable and knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested and changing. Four fields – the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life – looked at, thought about, worked in, lived with, written.
Dee’s four fields, which he has known for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his Cambridgeshire garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie field in Little Bighorn, Montana, USA, and a grass meadow in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild, to look at and think about the way we have messed things up but also to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass and fields.
Four Fields is a profound, lyrical book by one of Britain’s very best writers about nature.
Shortlisted for the 2014 Ondaatje Prize
Heavy with poetic resonance… [Dee] pushes the boundaries of nature writing, creating a form that is lyrical but deeply alert to ecological crisis. -- Miriam Darlington * BBC Wildlife *
First-rate evocation of the natural world merges with an elegiac note in these rich stories of the soil. * Independent *
[Dee’s] descriptions are constantly inventive; wry and fearless… A project as expansive, and as mesmerizing, as a fenland sky. -- Mary Crockett * Scotsman *
Dee’s writing is often quietly poetic, with the spirit of Gerard Manley Hopkins hovering overhead. -- Jon Day * Daily Telegraph *
Four Fields is an enthralling and unexpected book – or four short books – about what we have made of the natural world. The language itself is rich and loamy. There is evidence of much thought here, as well as a naturalist's profound observation. It is proof that really, there is no such thing as "nature writing" – Dee gives us the wide world and everything in it, including ourselves and all our works. -- Kathleen Jamie * Guardian *
Mesmerising… Four Fields is about far more than pieces of earth; it is a summary of humanity’s aspirations * Economist *
While the battle of Little Bighorn may be a familiar story, his account of the slow death of a Namibian farmstead near the desert is not, and is the finest section in the book. Dee's vision is at its most scalpel-like as he examines road-kill swallows or the bloated bodies of wildebeest piled up in rivers where they have failed to make the crossing. -- Hugh Thomson * Independent *
All this springs from Dee’s intense desire to convey his feelings about grass, the level lands where it grows, and the life, both natural and human, that accompanies it – and he succeeds mightily in doing that. -- Derwent May * The Times *
Wonderfully written prose... Sure to be well worth the wait. * The Great Outdoors *
You want to take your time to luxuriate in the beautiful prose and get lost within the literary references, ambling through it all in your own time, much like Dee does in his four fields. A great read. -- Phoebe Smith * Wanderlust *
- Short-listed for East Anglian Book Award for General Non-fiction 2014 (UK)
ISBN: 9780099541370
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 17mm
Weight: 202g
288 pages