“What a joyful, profound, passionate revelry of a book this is—an illumination of how words make worlds; a reminder of what is lost when a language is lost; an act of salvage for ways of being and seeing which are fast vanishing. To read Thirty-Two Words For Field is to be given new eyes and ears for land, weather, creaturely life, time, light and the animate Earth itself. In its plenishing of both word and mind, it is a work of quiet activism.”
—Robert Macfarlane, author of Is a River Alive?
“Magan traces the hidden filaments of the Irish language with astonishing vision and grace, revealing webs of relation between people and place, weather, and memory. This is a remarkable work that deepened my feeling of connection to a living world and expanded my sense of the possible.”
—Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life
“Magan shows how language is not just a tool of description but a way of inhabiting a place. By recovering these forgotten words, he makes visible the subtle textures of an older Ireland—one that still has much to teach us about perception, belonging, and care for the world we live in.”
—Fintan O’Toole, author of We Don’t Know Ourselves
“Manchán Magan listens to language as a practice of belonging. These words are more than history—they are tools for remembering how to be in right relationship with land, weather, and one another. Manchán inspires me to keep being voracious in learning the languages of this world i love.”
—adrienne maree brown, author of Loving Corrections and We Will Not Cancel Us
“Manchán Magan’s book welcomes those of us who don’t speak Irish into threads of that ancient culture by teaching us various words and phrases. His book reminds us that countless generations came before us and, through their carefully crafted language, left us gifts of perspective and understanding. A sunrise is never the same again once you know that, in Irish, it has five named stages. I got great joy from being gently guided into Magan’s language and culture. When I set this book down, I looked at our fields and the light across them with new eyes, and to do that in a book is no small achievement.”
—James Rebanks, author of The Place of Tides
“There are books that punctuate your life—changing your ways of thinking and living with such intensity that there is a clear before and after. Thirty-Two Words for Field is such a book. Manchán Magan has done the powerful work of stitching language back to breath, breath back to body, and body back to ecology. While the book resurrects the living myths seeded within the Irish language, Magan also more generally resurrects, with language both precise and lyrical, our capacity to dialogue with deep time, with our ancestors, and with our wider ecosystems. Nothing short of life-changing and lifesaving.”
—Sophie Strand, author of The Body Is a Doorway, The Madonna Secret, and The Flowering Wand
“Thirty-Two Words for Field is a joyous treasury of language that has been hiding in plain sight. Manchán curates a gentle ceremony of unearthing, locating speech that’s not transactional but transformational. Field is a gleeful revolution of a thing, a call to the inheritance we did not know we had. In Manchán’s world, words shape-leap into something that feels awfully like hope. It equips us to walk this world as an ancestor-in-training, not a ghost. His people will be proud. Field is a key to a bigger and more mysterious life.”
—Dr. Martin Shaw, author of Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us and Smoke Hole
“A rich, compelling, and often fanciful immersion in language that reflects openness, imagination, and considerable scholarship.”—Kirkus Reviews
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