A Moment in the Field:
Voices from Arthurian Legend
Poems by Margaret Lloyd
$12 paperback distributed by To purchase autographed copies from the author, For upcoming appearances and to schedule readings, Also by Margaret Lloyd:
Available from Praise for "It is a pleasure to see poetry that is neither young nor old. Poetry
of the adult heart. Beyond beginnings, past childhood, past first love,
past the first child.
And without nostalgia. This is fine poetry about a married heart that
is still ambitious." _________ About the Author
Margaret Lloyd was born in Liverpool, England of Welsh parents and grew up in a Welsh community in central New York State. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Leeds, England, and has published a book on William Carlos Williams’ poem Paterson (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). Her first poetry book, This Particular Earthly Scene, was published by Alice James Books. Lloyd completed A Moment in the Field while on a fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, an International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. Presently, she chairs the Humanities Department at Springfield College, Massachusetts. __________________ Related Links Readers interested in Welsh myth and legend and early Arthurian literature should go to The Mabinogi: Legend and Landscape of Wales.
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About A Moment in the Field 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." "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." "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." 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. |
