Arthurian legends have exerted a considerable fascination for people for fourteen centuries, and in the past two hundred years, they have provided material for operas, poems, novels, plays and movies. However, not until the publication of Margaret Lloyd's A Moment in the Field: Voices from Arthurian Legend has there been a book-length cyle of poems that remains faithful to early Arthurian sources while being contemporary in its style and concerns.
In this breathtaking sequence, Lloyd expands the territory in
which we all live as she explores emotional moments, situations, and
psychological states suggested by the early texts, particularly Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. While these poems primarily focus on female experiences which have often remained
hidden or gone unnoticed, they also evoke aspects of male experience not
traditionally accessed in Arthurian narratives. Deep archetypes emerge of the
great human dilemmas—the heartbreak of betrayal, the ubiquity of war, the
pathos of death, the mystery of romantic love.
Ultimately, these poems are about how we construct meaning in our
lives. As Lloyd writes in her
afterword, the characters in these poems
are “alive to
their emotions, aware of their perceptions and the complexity of their
situation, and willing to continue on their quest wherever it may lead, even if
in the end, they must fail.”
Praise for A Moment in the Field
"The old stories and the old characters are not as old as they are deep. They need to be awakened regularly to tell us their secrets. They require an enchantress to bring them back and help us hear them. Margaret Lloyd performs this priestess, Merlin, Cassandra, Mercury service here in splendid and powerful fashion, showing us how our daily passions, strong and subtle, light and dark, give us our humanity. You need courage to take these poems in, given the hot blood and sharp edge that Margaret Lloyd brings to them."
—Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and Dark Nights of the Soul
"The power of Arthurian legend, and of the hold romantic love has over human beings,
is shown again here in this moving sequence which speaks almost entirely in the
voices of the women of the stories. The harshness of landscape and culture these people were subject to -- the women, the men, and the children -- seems only framed differently, but very close to our own. Margaret Lloyd has gathered all this to
her with haunting empathy for human life and the life of the natural world."
—Jean Valentine, author of Door in the Mountain, winner of the 2004
National Book Award for Poetry
"Margaret
Lloyd uses the names and stories of legendary women, and some men, to
write a book of loves poems in a fresh, contemporary voice. The
emotional force of the poems lies in the eternal truths of human
feeling, of women in love, women betrayed, women as mothers, lovers,
widows. The men speak, too, as their human selves in love and pain.
Margaret Lloyd gives the old stories new life in this excellent
collection."
—Gillian Clarke, author of The King of Britain's Daughter and Making the Beds for the Dead
A Moment in the Field
Since I first saw him knighted in the court,
in the day and in the night,
in my mind and in my body
I have summoned him.
Now
I look at an iron stake and the fire,
waiting for the sun to climb
under the pale blue sky that binds us.
Now, for a moment, I have given up.
The noise of the crowd is a new silence,
the sun on my shoulders, freedom—
a freedom I felt only before
when I was the daughter of a king,
walking in another field
in the first warmth of May.
What can my eyes follow
but a pale yellow butterfly moving
away from me, leaf after leaf?
Not that I am not afraid of burning,
but for a moment,
I tell you, I feel free. Almost
not wanting him to come out of the forest,
throwing a gown over my chemise,
pulling my body up on the back of his horse,
binding me, binding me to him once again.
