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

In the wake of an unnamed calamity a solitary woman travels back to her childhood home, navigating the maze of narrow roads that cross-cut England's hinterlands below Hadrian's Wall. In the absence of human contact, the agency of the land itself begins to impress itself upon her consciousness, and, as her journey unfolds, her life and the lives of the dead, both recent and ancient, slowly reveal themselves as inextricably intertwined. Richard Skelton's second work of fiction continues his exploration of the relationship between landscape and human identity. Whereas 'The Look Away' focused on a claustrophobic, individual encounter, 'And Then Gone' expands to extend the narrative into the deep past, and the stories of lives now 'flattened between the pages of earth.'

And Then Gone

Skelton, Richard

Literary

Limnology

Hithe is the debut poetry collection of Jennifer Spector. An expatriate in Panama, her writing is the distillation of decades spent intimately attentive to her environment, to the lush verdancy of that narrow isthmus between the Atlantic and Pacific. These are poems that enfold narratives of passage, guided by unusual waymarks - from half-timbered, banked canoes to the freight of the hollows, and what carries across shifting languages and bodies untethered from ground. Hithe presents dioramas of the traversed natural and imagined worlds, where locality is rerouted, moving inwardly over a sketch of elusive lines - a lean-to by a river, a thatched roundhouse, a coracle willowed in the interval, a body losing hem as it becomes the boat. Poised at this place of edges, Spector's writing treads the line between motion and fixity, ever circling the question of what it means to be a long time away from 'home'.

Hithe

Spector, Jennifer

Kerala Journal is a series of poetic dispatches from the Malabar Coast of India, written between March 2019 and January 2021 by American poet Kim Dorman. The book is inspired by forms of classical Japanese literature, especially the travel diaries of Matsuo Bash&#333;. By focusing on the small, often rhythmic events of daily life, Dorman's work transfigures the local into the universal. He alerts us to the linguistic discoveries of a poetry in which acts of perception ripple quietly through the individual; a poetry that is therefore attentive to both sensation and reflection. While many of the poems in Kerala Journal are distilled into just a few words, they explore a wide yet intimate gamut of experience: rivers, roads, people, trees, birds, insects, plants and flowers. The changing seasons, phases of the moon and times of day are keenly felt presences. The book itself is suffused with his life-long reading of a wide array of sources: classical Chinese poetry, medieval Indian devotional and philosophical works, the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, William Blake, the journals of Gilbert White and Dorothy Wordsworth, and 20th century American poets William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Cid Corman, Robert Lax and Lorine Niedecker. The result is nothing less than a modern classic.

Kerala Journal

Dorman, Kim

Harmonia Mundi borrows its title from Johannes Kepler's melodious theory of the heavens, but the 'alarming geometry' that Tim Lilburn presents in these forty-one poems is far from harmonious. Part One, 'The Philosophical History', focuses on the suppression of Plato's Academy in the early 6th century, followed by its disastrous relocation to the court of Khusrau in Persia. Part Two, 'Actants, Conatus', is rooted in contemporary Canada, albeit with a cast of characters that include Augustine, Christ, Duns Scotus, Aelred of Rievaulx and even Kepler himself. These two apparently disparate sections are connected by their preoccupation with loss - with 'beauty infiltrated everywhere' - and by a feeling of political disaffection at the demise of certain sustaining paradigms. Harmonia Mundi is a timely and darkly visionary text, which, amid the spreading collapse of the world around us, clings to a single, urgent truth: 'You must hate / nothing'.

Harmonia Mundi

Lilburn, TIm

'Figured Stones' is a masterpiece of natural philosophy and a vital contribution to the emerging field of vibrant materialism. It is both a manual of visionary geology and a treatise on lithic scrying; a manifesto on rock veneration and an exploration of deep-time consciousness. In vivid and lucent prose, Paul Prudence crosses the 'blood-brain barrier of dimensionality', condensing and expanding both space and time by drawing the extremities of scale into paradoxical alignment. Vast landscapes become visible in miniature surfaces, and, liberated from our reductive impressions of time, rock itself becomes pliant, mercurial and alive. In this expanded state, the lithosphere is self-aware, memorising its own telluric activity, from weather patterns to the fluid dynamics of rivers.\nWith Prudence as a guide we encounter rocks as messengers, talismans and oracles. Stones become portals to other worlds and act as intermediaries to the domains of gods, demons and spirits. Geology acts as a divinatory system for decoding dreams, or as a tool for connecting us to our greater ancestral consciousness. At a time when we are barely cognisant of the lives of other-than-human beings, Prudence resuscitates the pre-Socratic doctrine of hylozoism - that all matter has life. Throughout the pages of 'Figured Stones', rocks become agents for studying planetary introspection and geological sentience - they reveal an 'inter-animating spirit of mind and matter where biological and mineral kingdoms collude'.\n'Figured Stones' is destined to become an important book in a new movement that acknowledges and embraces more-than-human life at a critical time in our global ecology.

Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary

Arts & Photography

Prudence, Paul

History & Criticism

Selected Poems, 1975-2021

Domanski, Don

A wounded man in a fugue state hides out in a deserted north-country shieling, convinced that he is pursued. Over the days and weeks that follow, as no one comes to claim him, his mind turns from his pursuers to the hills themselves, and their other-than-human inhabitants. Gradually he is caught up in a drama that can have only one conclusion. After nearly a decade of writing poetry and non-fiction, Richard Skelton has arrived at a form that is most like the music for which he is well-known: the slow accumulation of mood and atmosphere, the repetition of stark phrases, the bleak beauty, the loam and grit. In The Look Away, Skelton has written a powerful, intensely bleak, yet redemptive, novella that redraws mythic lines and repositions humanity in a more complex and ambiguous relationship with the natural world.

The Look Away

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

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