The Long Field
Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
For readers of H Is for Hawk, an intimate memoir of belonging and loss and a mesmerizing travelogue through the landscapes and language of Wales
Hiraeth is a Welsh word that's famously hard to translate. Literally, it can mean "long field" but generally translates into English, inadequately, as "homesickness." At heart, hiraeth suggests something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time—an acute awareness of the presence of absence.
In The Long Field, Pamela Petro braids essential hiraeth stories of Wales with tales from her own life—as an American who found an ancient home in Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a terrible AMTRAK train crash, and as the daughter of a parent with dementia. Through the pull and tangle of these stories and her travels throughout Wales, hiraeth takes on radical new meanings. There is traditional hiraeth of place and home, but also queer hiraeth; and hiraeth triggered by technology, immigration, ecological crises, and our new divisive politics. On this journey, the notion begins to morph from a uniquely Welsh experience to a universal human condition, from deep longing to the creative responses to loss that Petro sees as the genius of Welsh culture. It becomes a tool to understand ourselves in our time.
A finalist for the Wales Book of the Year Award and named to the Telegraph's and Financial Times's Top 10 lists for travel writing, The Long Field is an unforgettable exploration of “the hidden contours of the human heart.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Artist Petro (Travel in an Old Tongue) explores a wide range of subjects, including her queerness, her father's illness, and surviving a train crash, in this excellent memoir. An American, Petro first visited Wales as a student in the 1980s and made the country her permanent home after completing a master's degree there. As she dug into Welsh culture, she became fascinated with "hiraeth," a word that has no precise English translation, but most closely means "long field" and refers to a sense of longing for something unattainable. Using hiraeth as a lens and an access point, Petro examines the people and places she's longed for throughout her own life. The book's most affecting sections focus on her long-term relationship with her partner, Marguerite, who provided Petro with "the kind of expansive love and happiness that's the basis of all art and every happiness in the world," despite their on and off connection, which Petro renders in searing, self-aware detail. She's equally adept at lighter moments, as when she's caught in a Kafkaesque saga, before she lived in Wales permanently, while seeking to enter the country to teach a writing workshop without a work visa and deemed a "grave criminal." Wonderful turns of phrase ("A short field is easily crossed. A long field separates you from what you love on the other side. It's the quintessential, ancient incarnation of absence") and openhearted candor make this sing.
