Over the course of six years, Autumn Richardson has written a singularly powerful poetic sequence of great bravery and beauty, dealing as it does with the elemental questions of existence: hunger, nourishment, necessity, sacrifice. Here, within the wilderness landscapes of alpine mountains, boreal forests and limestone plateaus, where the commonplace comforts are absent, there is only the warmth of a carefully tended fire, 'a spark beneath vastness', and all thoughts turn to the incredible brightness of even the smallest, most seemingly insignificant life. In each spare line, as lean as the coyote that visits her in the night, the weight of each word is carefully considered, and the question asked - as in all meaningful journeys - shall I bring this with me? Can I afford to carry it? And so this is a sequence of sheddings - of old skins, personas, thoughts - a stripping down to the elemental, so that transformations can arise. An Almost-Gone Radiance is a vital statement of personal and esoteric philosophy for those looking for the all-but-vanished traces of wisdom, burning on the fires of our civilisation's ruins...

An Almost-Gone Radiance

Literature & Fiction

Richardson, Autumn

Poetry

Xylem Books

Three years in the making, Heart of Winter is a beautiful and poignant series of found poems by Autumn Richardson, assembled from the notes written by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen and botanist Dr. Thorild Wulff during the Second Thule Expedition - a journey charting a little-known area of the far north-western coast of Greenland, from April to September, 1917. Some of Rasmussen's journals were afterwards edited by himself, and published as Greenland by the Polar Sea in 1921. During this expedition they traversed a vast landscape, by foot and by sledge, travelling more than a 1000 kilometres. A large portion of their journey was spent crossing the perilous and desolate 'inland-ice', an earlier term for the Greenland Ice Sheet. Dr. Wulff sadly lost his life on the return journey, as did one other member of the expedition, Hendrik Olsen. Every dog they brought with them also perished. These poems are accompanied by a selection of Inuit songs, originally documented by Knud Rasmussen and published as Snehyttens Sange in 1930. Rasmussen's Danish versions are republished here alongside new English translations by Autumn Richardson. Heart of Winter is completed by an author's preface, nine botanical plates featuring Arctic flora, and a detailed index listing the plants recorded by Dr. Wulff in his Greenland diary. 'The writings of Rasmussen, the Inuit songs, and the final notes of Dr. Wulff, share moments of life at its slimmest, its most immediate. Each recount life-threatening and life- sustaining experiences, and the endurance of incredible hardship, yet in their words there is also at times a euphoria; an awareness of the immense beauty surrounding them, and a recognition of the preciousness of each small life that they encounter.' (from the author's preface)

Heart of Winter

Between 2010 and 2015, Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton produced a series of collaborative artworks, publications and editions about the upland landscapes of south-western Cumbria, in northern England. Key to their work has been the development of the list-poem, which, at its most fundamental, magnifies the act of attention and the facility of language - through naming - to refer to things, places, to life itself. The texts they assemble frequently contain material drawn from a variety of sources: pollen diagrams, dialect glossaries, cartographic records, archaeological tracts - but their repurposing of this material as art is deeply humane, aimed at drawing the attention towards the lost, forgotten or overlooked. It celebrates the poetry and beauty that such attention can reveal, and gently urges each of us towards a more intimate relationship with our natural surroundings. In January of 2015, the Cumbrian charity Lakeland Arts staged an exhibition of their work at Abbot Hall and Blackwell. The show incorporated printed matter, artefacts, assemblages, music and film from the previous five years, along with new works, including a wolf skeleton focal piece, generously loaned from Kendal Museum. Memorious Earth collects the artists' Cumbrian work between 2010 and 2015, incorporating all their previously published (and now out-of-print) text works with an introductory overview written by the artists themselves. First published by their own Corbel Stone Press in 2015, this new Xylem Books edition includes two subsequently commissioned pieces, Thwaite and Furness Fells, as well as a gazetteer of place-names from the south-western uplands. Memorious Earth is a vital document of what must surely constitute one of the most significant small-press collaborations of recent years.

Memorious Earth: A Longitudinal Study

Skelton, Richard

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Books by Richardson, Autumn

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Richardson, Autumn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

An Almost-Gone Radiance

Heart of Winter

Memorious Earth: A Longitudinal Study