Review by Tracey Foster of "The Living Mountain" by Nan Shepherd

This is such a light book, wrapped in a simple white and gold jacket, so unassuming and yet what a glorious explosion of colour, sound, texture and life tucked inside it. I'd heard great things about this book, the author's name often dropped by other great nature writers, such as Robert Macfarlane, Kerry Andrews, Rebecca Solnit. This tiny gem of sublime prose written at the end of the Second World War, hidden from publication for thirty years, labelled as 'mineral memoried' by Macfarlane, is a must for the bookshelf - a gift that will keep giving every time you read it.

Anna (Nan) Shepherd was also a tiny woman, slight in stature but mighty in voice. She began, like all visitors to the Cairngorms, seeking height, conquering peeks to look down on the valleys, but she began to understand them as one whole body and spent time on this body, not subduing it: 'I knew when I'd looked for a long time, that I had hardly begun to see.'

Each chapter breaks down her experiences into the senses rather than scenery; air, water, frost and snow are exquisitely explored and lead to the final chapter on just 'being.' She fully believed that time spent with her mountains led to a life of the senses, lived so purely that 'the body may be said to think.' Each foot placed and lifted was an act of breathing. This interplay of perception and reception is unique, slowing down the pedestrian to explore the person: 'I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.'

The introduction by Macfarlane calls the mountains Shepherd's 'inland island.' Her book is a love letter to her experiences. She called her book a 'traffic of love,' and she sends love from the mountains through her words to us - using her eyes to feel. 'How can I number the ways which the eye gives me entry? - the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces.'

Shepherd also understood that there are many perspectives when faced with such a wide vista. David Hockney noted that we see more than one focal point within one view. She revels in this change from moment to moment as mist and low cloud can shift the landscape at alarming speed. Often this leads to misconception as the eye is tricked by every rock, branch, or boulder. This serves to remind the walker that 'One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable.'

War itself makes no appearance in this book as she leaves home to avoid any news of it, but she does mention the fatalities on her mountains; including the aircraft crew who misjudged the difficulty of the terrain and a party of school children who were caught by a sudden change of weather: 'Some are not rescued. A man and girl are found, months too late, far out of their path, the girl on abraded hands and knees as she crawled her way through drift. I see her living face still. (She was one of my students).'

The mountain is not always a friend but is constant and in a world of tumultuous change, it must have been a welcome diversion. In these times of difficult challenges, we all need a place to turn to that will steady us, a path to tread that will keep us moving forwards: 'I have discovered my mountain - its weathers, its airs and lights, its singing burns, its haunted dells, its pinnacles and tarns, its birds and flowers, its snows, its long blue distances.'

Read this book and you too might discover its treasures.

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by CommaPress, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Zine magazine and The Arts Council and she writes her own blog, Small Sublime.

Review by Tracey Foster of "Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain" by Matthew Green

Imagining our home, town and local landscape as a wasteland; envisaging the future for our sea-ravaged coasts and climate-battered green spaces is a real prospect that we face today. Matthew Green makes this all the more possible with this well researched book as he takes on a journey through existing derelict sites here on our own British soils. These include places simply eradicated through disease, plagues, coastal erosion, storm surges and land acquisition, leaving us with a ghost map of former communities. Green, a historian, writer and broadcaster, knows how to tell a good tale and evokes a sublime sense of the uncanny with descriptions of visits to these sites. Abandoned homes, half-shelled churches, submerged dwellings and fake buildings make ideal sites to set a horror movie.

The cult of the picturesque began in the eighteenth century and the hunt for the ideal gothic ruin set the middle classes wandering over our own local sites of abandonment. Prior to this no one cared enough to notice and nature was left to take over where man had fled. The passion for old antiquities saw an outbreak of "ruin poetry," waxing lyrical about the joys of the desolation and pathos that surrounded such sites. Old ruins became national monuments and were put back on the maps. The romantic movement that followed revelled in the desolate, evoking reverie to ponder life, death, longing, absence and mourning. One such place to inspire scores of collections of poetry was Dunwich, Britain's lost Atlantis. This was a whole city built on the Suffolk coast, comprising several large churches and a thriving port. A series of huge storm surges eroded the cliffs beneath it and its demise was recorded in early photographs and newspaper reports. The sad sight of a graveyard tumbling onto the rocks below brought many visitors to the site, to write, paint and muse on life's fragility. The writer Henry James being one of them, this prompted him to say: "Sadness hung in the air like the salt spray of the sea; a sense of squandered potential pervaded everything and yet was somehow uplifting."

Green also gets special permission to visit the military training zones on Norfolk. This was land acquired during WW2 that encompassed several old villages on the promise to return them after the war. Several residents left notes pinned to their front door for the army, asking them to take care of their family’s homes in the anticipation of a return. What is left behind now is a ravished wilderness and bombed-out buildings. Very little remains for those families to return to apart from the church where they are allowed back one day a year at Christmas to tend graves and gather to sing hymns: "The path of lime trees leading to the church is specially illuminated and on those bittersweet occasions, the cadences of their song, the streaks of the choir, the gushing of the air through the bellows of the organ effuse from the glowing nave, soaring over the shards, the mounds and the ruins of deserted and disfigured villages, transforming them through the redemptive power of sorrow, and resurrecting them in the theatre of the mind."

What Green did find there was a range of fake building shells, made up in fine detail to replicate medieval Normandy towns, German hamlets, post-war Soviet concrete jungles and even a market town of Basra, simulating the ongoing challenges of today's army recruits: "It was one of the eeriest, most disquieting places I have ever set foot in."

Green travels from the top of Scotland in St Kilda on a journey through lost Britain to the submerged village of Capel Celyn in Wales and takes us with him. Embarking on this journey and in the process losing his father and his marriage, he faced a long period of emotional turmoil: "Ambushed by memories, with the past hanging like a pall in the air, the present seemed so thin as to barely exist at all."

His personal circumstance is in tune with our times. The British psyche, used to change, as our land mass alters and shifts through waves of invasion and geological movement, looks set to face the greatest alteration of all. This book is a fascinating insight into the previous lives that were altered, communities that were lost and the warnings we can take from a long view of nature's reclamation. 

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Zine magazine and The Arts Council and she writes her own blog, Small Sublime, here. 

Review by Beth Gaylard of "God's Country" by Kerry Hadley-Pryce

‘Landscape is a cauldron for Kerry Hadley-Pryce’s intensely creepy and evocative writing’ (Georgina Bruce, Black Static). This blurb on the front cover of God’s Country should act as a warning, not just about the nature of the book, but the character of the setting – her own setting, the Black Country. Of the book, she says: ‘I think it contains part of my own DNA …  It’s the paths I have walked.’ Of the landscape, she writes ‘there was more than just a smell about this place, there was a proper feel of it that she hadn’t expected. There was a stillness of air inside there that seemed to hold something primitive.’

If you are expecting that this ‘cauldron,’ a rural farm, will produce a novel resembling a wholesome soup or a nourishing stew, think again, because before you know it you are drawn (through the protagonist, Alison) into a family nightmare that you desperately, fervently want to end well, if only it can. Alison has just undergone a traumatic event which she cannot share, for the moment at least, and the whole book is told from her unsettled point of view. Her physical pain and discomfort – she is beset by a migraine all the way through the book, almost a character in its own right, and the weirdness of the migraine experience mirrors the disjointed personalities of other characters that she meets.

The family is not hers but her boyfriend Guy’s, and they are making their way to the Black Country farm where he grew up with his twin brother Ivan, who has finally died after a long illness. Their father, known only as Flood, is the God of God’s Country, an implacably cruel man who has somehow managed to destroy all his family as well as the farm. As soon as they reach their destination it is obvious that Guy hasn’t told Alison all the secrets it holds. 

The narrative unfolds in a convoluted version of the conditional tense which addresses the reader directly, allowing an omniscient point of view and implying that some kind of interview with Alison will take place at a point in the future, after the end of the story. This stylistic device works surprisingly well, allowing the reader to see beyond the end of the story and enabling the unknown narrator to address the reader directly and at a distance: ‘She’ll say she wants to tell you this story, and in the act of telling it, she knows she’ll probably leave some gaps, but in the act of you reading it, you’ll give it shape.’

God’s Country is an important contribution to those strands of literature that bring landscape to life, but it is also compelling and unpredictable, as it unfolds past secrets which continue to affect a family in thrall to its most powerful member. One of the best reads this year.

About the reviewer
Beth Gaylard is a PhD student of Creative Writing, currently in her write-up period. Her topic is solastalgia in rural England. She has a self-published speculative fiction novel, Firebrands, on Kindle. She lives in Leicestershire.

You can read more about God's Country by Kerry Hadley-Pryce on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Tracey Foster of "Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems" by Simon Armitage

Sometimes we assimilate into the region that we are born into and sometimes it has a habit of permeating through us, long after we have left it. ‘Scratch my skin, I’ve got cinders in blood stream’: as a writer who is drawn to the north of my youth, I can fully empathise with Simon Armitage and his fifty-year relationship with a place that has been an inspiration and an echo that has woven through many of his poems. Watching the world from his bedroom window as a small child, his back to the moor, these ‘moonstruck observations’  were the seeds of inspiration that would come into sharp focus as an adult: ‘At night, the horizon brimmed with a darkness like outer space, crowding the corner of my eye, thickening and deepening at the back of my mind.’ 

This collection of fifty poems, entitled Magnetic Field, covers the span of his craft and contains some early unpublished pieces and some new poems written especially for this publication. Here, the landscape is revealed; even before the words can rush our ears, the land itself is offered as a visual prompt. The book jacket insides are decorated with a bird’s eye view of the topography that inspired the writer’s musing, a landscape that he calls ‘transcendent and transgressive.’ A graphic nib punctuates every dot of the moor and grassy knoll of the surrounding heathland, setting the tone before we delve into the punchy style of his prose. The River Colne, the canal and the inter-Pennine train line all cut through the granite outcrops that flank the small town, suggest a route out, a getaway to another life and possibilities that must have tempted the young aspiring poet. We are given specific markers on the map to place the poems within the land, honing our view right down to his dad’s greenhouse nestled behind a row of terrace houses:

          When you disturbed them
          The seeds of rose-bay willow-herbs lifted
          Like air bubbles into the beam of light.
          Then you’d emerge, a hoard of tomatoes
          Swelling the lap of your luminous shirt. 

The obsession with his childhood home, that he calls ‘a cathedral of the ordinary,’ is again and again a starting point for his recollections. We are taken on a sepia journey to his distant past and misdemeanours. His poem 'Privet,' based on a punishment of arduous pruning, dished out by his father to atone for some offence, ends with his young body lying prostrate on the bush, ‘floating there, cushioned and buoyed by a million matchwood fingertips.’ His parents are a tender refrain that punctuate the text, a working-class embrace that can’t be contained within a valley. He fondly recalls his mother,

          at the twin-tub, 
          manhandling shirts, 
          hauling drowning sailors 
          from sea to deck.

With good humour, Samuel Laycock, ‘the other Marsden poet’ is recalled and used for textual intervention. He deliberately adopted the Lancashire dialect of the cotton workers in his pieces and is commonly known as the bard of the loom, the workshop and the mill. Similarly, Armitage lets his own voice flow through his poems too, and the voices of his parents lovingly nag in in dialect: ‘An imperial spanner and a saw so blunt, we could ride it bare-arsed to London.’ 

The passing of time and the passing of lives are felt keenly in the prose. We shift back to his thirteen-year-old self, leaving the house by the back door and returning as a man years later who asks, ‘How did it get so late?’ The past is ever present, the memories are keen, we watch, participate and feel each heartbeat counting the time. This ache of absence is tenderly felt, as the trivial becomes poignant on passing. Two poems about his dad face each other on the page, 'The Spelling' and 'Fisherwood,' and try to face up to the loss of those we love: ‘There’s no reply. I am too late. But every son carries a key / On a string, noosed around his neck.’ 

In one poem, Armitage is hauling a dusty Harmonium from Marsden church with his dad, whose smoker’s fingers and ‘dottled thumbs’ help lift the heavy load:

          Him being him he has to say
          That the next box I’ll shoulder through this nave
          Will bear the load of his own dead weight.
          And me being me I mouth in reply
          Some shallow or sorry phrase or word
          Too starved of breath to make itself heard. 

From skimming stones across Black Moss to the tractor tyre let loose to roll freely from the moors through the main street, I thoroughly enjoyed this collection. With this homage to a northern life, I found affection for the child who’d spied his mother, crossing the street with a shopping bag, ‘nursing four ugly potatoes caked in mud,’ to the man under whose eyelids ‘northern lights and solar flares shimmer and rage.’  This is a loving tribute to a place that made him.

About the reviewer
As a teacher of Art and Design for over thirty years, Tracey has channelled her imagination into getting the best creative output out of others. She is now hoping to restore her creative mojo and has enrolled on the Creative Writing MA course at Leicester University. Last year, she completed the Comma Press short story course with Rebecca Burns and collectively published Tales from Garden Street. She is due to have first poem published by the Poetry Bus magazine and is currently working on a poetry collection.

Review by Emma Lee of "Cloud River" by Charles Bennett

Charles Bennett's Cloud River explores the restorative values of spending time in the natural landscape. The title poem contains an invite: 

'Imagine stepping into, stepping onto,
a river in the sky: like a journey down a length of weather-music -
something being said without words.

Visible for a moment, then slowly blowing away,
a fusion of water and air, I make
a brief causeway across the blue.'

These are quiet moments of stillness, of being alone in nature but the focus and engagement is external. 

'Flatlander's Lullaby' makes effective use of consonance and assonance to give the poem an appropriately lyrical feel:

'Cruise my little skater across the pondback
              skim the dark water towards dawnlight.'

Later, a 'Fen Raft Spider' sits on the 

    'flimsy meniscus in a clockwork dance,
         until you read a beginning    
                         in the quiet deep. And then -

you open the page of water and do not stop
        until you have found out
                     what happens at the end.'

It's not the only poem to make a connection between nature and writing, exploring how close observation and the freedom of space allow creativity. These poems wear their craft lightly, drawing attention towards their images and messages so readers focus on what the poem is illustrating and conveying. Although all the poems are linked by theme, they vary in their rhythm, pacing and form so avoid the trap of similarity. Cloud River shows how quiet moments in the natural world open up a writer's mind to inspiration.


About the reviewer
Emma Lee’s recent collection is Ghosts in the Desert (IDP, 2015). The Significance of a Dress is forthcoming from Arachne. She co-edited Over Land, Over Sea (Five Leaves, 2015), reviews for The Blue Nib, High Window Journal, The Journal, London Grip, Sabotage Reviews and blogs at http://emmalee1.wordpress.com.