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Buying the Farm
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781848619821
Publisher: Shearsman Books
Published: Jul 4 2025
Pages: 136
Weight: 0.42
Height: 0.32 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Eliza O'Toole's landmark work is much more than a 'word-hoard' of and around the farmland of East Anglia, the territory of Constable and Gainsborough. This is an angular book of linguistic inventiveness and substance, at once multilingual and polyphonic employing different registers to accommodate a divergent range and depth of agricultural, botanical, lepidoptera, historical and etymological knowledge. Each poem is in the present with an imposing sense of the past being visible within a mutable natural world. This is a mapping of place that digs deep down into the biochemistry and fragility of the land, wildlife, plants, insects, animals and farming life. In its slant investigation of the layered traces of time worked into the land, it considers whether current farming practices are obsolete by asking obliquely, 'can the land afford a farm' or 'has the farm already been bought'? As a lexical analogue of the land, it delivers a vibrant, messy, stricken world of polychronic becomings. This is an extraordinary achievement. -David Caddy
In their density, their rawness, and in their brilliant uses of the English language as a ground on and from which earth can be newly sung, these extraordinary poems rival Manley Hopkins in their ability to enact what they describe, or lament, or love. -Chris McCully
In her unique and captivating voice, Eliza O'Toole's new collection portrays complex legacies of farming. The poet buries deep into the vulnerable furrows of a rural setting that is her home, and the lives, both human and animal, that depend on it. These poems question concepts of territory, ownership, labour and habitat across centuries, where an 'aftermath' can bring new growth or devastating consequences. Buying the Farm provides an astonishing, vital recording of East Anglian landscape, written in poems of agile beauty. -Rebecca Goss
Eliza O'Toole is a poet of rare creative power. Her work is revelatory, and exploratory, going beyond the human experience to give expression to the being of land itself - its memory and mythology; its constitution and construction; its power and its servitude. Paradoxically, despite its title, this is not an elegy. Eliza deploys the immense discourse of law and lore, history and science at her command to create a new world of words with a precision tempered by profound knowledge and a playful imagination. In doing so, she opens us to the depths and precarious joys of a lived world. -Moyra Tourlamain
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