Tag: books
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Undertow
Walking the Edge A trusted mentor once told me, having read my work, “You often write about the meeting places of land and water.” She was right, though I’d never thought about the habit before; my tendency to do so was neither intentional nor premeditated. “There are few things more ancient than humans walking to…
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Mapping the In-Betweens
By the time I was seven I had moved house four times in three countries on two continents. A few years later, I found myself dropped into another new place: a summer spent in Čelákovice, a small town in the Czech Republic. Culture shock, the hollowness of first-time jetlag, feeling so fragile and porous that…
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Entrained Rhythms
I: Aretha I’ve just moved to Uppsala, Sweden, where at first I knew no-one, apart from my old friend Kalle, who with characteristic kindness invited me to go see Amazing Grace with him as soon as I arrived. We packed into the smallest room of the Fyrisbiografen, a tiny cinema constructed in 1911 and now…
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From A Queer Ornithology
For those who delight more in the seed of things, I can say that these poems investigate queer, genderfluid indigeneity, and interspecies-relational philosophy through deep observation of wild birds.
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Chanctonbury Rings
Chanctonbury Rings is a new spoken word and music project on Ghost Box Records by the poet and writer Justin Hopper and folk musician Sharron Kraus, and featuring Ghost Box’s own Belbury Poly. The album is based on live performances of Hopper’s book The Old Weird Albion (Penned in the Margins, 2017), a poetic and…
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Scrub
Beyond the chain-link fence of my primary school, across the alleyway into town, was a land of fascination. We called it the ‘waste ground’ and I’d wander there looking for treasures among the broken fireplaces and scuffed concrete. Garden survivors rose from the cracks and dust: snapdragons, evening primrose, mullein. This was suburban south-west London….
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Gardens Speak
The Political Performance of Mourning Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation based on the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in gardens across Syria during the first two years of the uprising. Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the friends and family members of the deceased to retell their stories,…
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The Look Away
Although I cannot see them, I know they are out there. Hare. Fox. Raven. Each waiting to play their part. – Richard Skelton, The Look Away A sense of ominous foreboding pervades The Look Away, the debut novel from Richard Skelton, musician, poet, and co-founder, along with Autumn Richardson, of Corbel Stone…
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We Were Strangers
A friend of mine passed away a few months ago and, although we were never especially close, his death affected me deeply. For a time afterwards I found myself impelled, on my lunch breaks, to leave the office block in central Manchester where I work and spend an hour walking – briskly yet purposelessly –…
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The Gathering Cloud / An Ocean of Static
I write from Edinburgh, from a flat enveloped by the haar, a cold fog that comes in off the sea and whites out the world. The fog binds land with sea and sky. It feels like an apt place and time from which to respond, briefly, to two recent books by JR Carpenter – The…
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Rethinking Mythogeography
I first came across Phil Smith in Walking, Writing and Performance, in which he appears as ‘The Crab Man’, an alter ego also credited as one of the contributors to 2010’s Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways: a collection of fragmentary narratives that construct and deconstruct an approach to walking as an artistic practice, a…