Walk the Blue Fields
By Claire Keegan
Black Cat, 168 pages, $13

Every nation has been changed by globalization but perhaps none so much as Ireland. In just a couple of decades it has gone from being one of the poorest countries in Europe to being one of the most prosperous, a leader in information technology and a mecca for foreign investors. The social and emotional adjustments have been wrenching, though, with the older generation challenged, as ever, by the pace of change.

One aging curmudgeon recounts what he has observed of the new Ireland in "Walk the Blue Fields," Claire Keegan's superb story collection: "Young people couldn't catch a fish or skim cream off milk. They went around in cars they couldn't afford, with small children who'd never tasted their mothers' milk, committing adultery at the drop of a hat. In fact, hats didn't drop fast enough for them. They drank beer straight from the bottle, came back from America and Prague looking for pizzas, and couldn't tell a common potato from a Victoria plum."

The short stories of Ms. Keegan, who was born on a farm south of Dublin in 1968, capture the poetic essence of this land in transition, a country tentatively facing the future while still consumed by ancient customs, outlooks, legends, fears and fantasies. Scratch the affluent surface, her tales suggest, and you'll find the immemorial Ireland of Synge and Yeats.

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While she seems to have inherited the national gift for language, Ms. Keegan resists its downside, a tendency toward gratuitous lyricism. She never overwritaes. The eight stories that make up "Walk the Blue Fields" are tight and economic -- one is almost tempted to say laconic -- and yet they are also filled with rich images. A priest, the hero of the title story, reflects on the perennial question "Where is God?" and discovers that "tonight God is answering back. All around the air is sharp with the tang of wild currant bushes. A lamb climbs out of a deep sleep and walks across the blue field. Overhead, the stars have rolled into place. God is nature."

Ms. Keegan specializes in lonely or at least solitary characters, reflective introverts whose lives mirror the meaningful quiet of the land. In "The Forester's Daughter," Martha Deegan can scarcely tolerate the crude, inarticulate husband she shouldn't have married; she chafes at the futility of married life, of "making a bed, of drawing and pulling curtains"; she "rose late, drank her tea on the doorstep and threw meals together same as she was packing a suitcase." In "Night of the Quicken Trees," the heartbroken Margaret moves to an isolated farm, deciding to "stay in that house for as long as she could without harming anybody or letting anybody harm her" but in the end can't help getting mixed up with her only neighbor, a man even more reclusive and eccentric than she.

In the manner of so many first-rate talents, Ms. Keegan apprehends the tragedy and the humor of her surroundings in almost equal measure. While her characters' lives have all been blighted in one way or another, they are not without beauty, and they seldom lack some measure of consolation.

Ms. Allen is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.