Stricken Fields, Jane Weir

In Stricken Fields, the landscape becomes both wound and witness — a terrain where memory, loss, and renewal conspire in the textures of language. The poems unfold like measured stitches across a fabric of grief and embodiment: the “fields” are at once literal and metaphorical, scarred by absence yet charged with a persistence of presence. In the sharp cadence of the lines, the reader is invited to dwell on the quiet collisions of body and geography, of trauma and emergence, as though the poem itself were weaving a new cloth from the frayed edges of what has been torn. The tone is spare, the imagery tactile: you feel the soil’s hold, the breath of wind across a scar, the subtle shift of light in evening’s hush.

What lifts this collection is its attention to materiality — to the weight of unsaid things, the gathering of debris into meaning, the way a field might remember pressure, footsteps, absence. The poems do not rush to catharsis; they map the slow repair, the way time folds over the wound, how landscapes become metaphors of internal terrain and the body keeps its own cartography. Through understated ritual, the verse explores how one inhabits the “stricken field” of life beyond loss, how one stitches again, how the terrain of the self might re‑learn how to hold light.

About the Author
Jane Weir (b. 1963) is an Anglo‑Italian writer, designer and poet whose work bridges craft history and lyric imagination. Winner of the Wigtown Poetry Prize and celebrated for her sensitive textual portraits, she is the author of Walking the Block (2008) and Spine (2012) — poetic biographies that explore textile-making figures through archival empathy. A contributor to Selvedge, PN Review and Faber anthologies, Weir’s work is deeply rooted in material culture and language-as-structure.

Publication date: 2020
Publisher: Templar Poetry
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9781911132820