Praise and Poems

Less pessimistic than R S Thomas, T S Eliot or Elizabeth Jennings, Victoria Field is that rara avis, the religious poet. Her spiritual realities are firmly anchored in contemporary reality. Her poems illuminate the heart, and shine with richness of compassion and understanding of human predicament and travail. Place is key with this poet, from Russia to Cornwall, from Pakistan to Kent, Toronto to Wales; in these and other places the poet weaves exhilaration and elegy in poems that travel the globe of perception and arrive on the page in their own transforming and containing energy. This is a beautiful collection.
Penelope Shuttle

For the wider readership of poetry, the drama of Victoria Field’s third collection will lie in its move from the Cornish tides and stonework that have been her bardic school, into a diversity ever less predictable. Past the attained splendour of ‘After the Wedding’, her muse gains a sprightliness of figures rather than places; even the brown towns of Cornwall become intermingled with Prague and Lake Orta. A man on an airliner who carries himself in his head is followed by an inn that audibly summons up the Bantings, warriors against diabetes, who lived near Niagara after World War I. Voices join scenery, and static portraits give way to emotions conjured, for example, by the mysterious talk of women with angular hair in a café, or the moon-faced daughter and her brothers who have never been born.
Les Murray