Cornwall-based Guillemot Press specialises in carefully designed, often collaborative poetry editions. Alec Finlay’s The Walkative Revolution (2025) is an illustrated hardback combining poetry, visual composition and manifesto-like writing. Selima Hill’s Two Women in a Car Park (2026), with artwork by her son, Moby Hill, takes the form of a compact landscape volume.
Finlay is a Scottish poet and artist whose work explores landscape, ecology, naming and access. When chronic illness constrained the poet’s ability to move through the world, he reconsidered what it is to walk, be a walker, or a "not-walker," and creatively adapt to limits. Hill is known for psychologically charged poetic sequences in which tenderness, menace and surreal transformation exist side by side. Although very different in form and tone, these collections share an interest in movement, stillness and thresholds: between participation and exclusion, intimacy and privacy, forward motion and rest.
The Walkative Revolution challenges a tradition in which walking is closely associated with freedom, independence and authority. Finlay’s statement that "a path must be walked / or it will cease to exist" presents movement not as conquest but as an act of maintenance. In essence, a path survives through repeated use, where walking becomes a relationship between bodies, landscapes and the communities that keep routes open. This idea is developed through the proxy walk, whose participants are described as "the walker, the recipient, the artist": a small cast list and a choreography of roles. One person follows the route, another receives the walk – as though by post, pulse or proxy – and a third turns the experience into artistic form, translating footfall into form and step into script. The encounter with landscape no longer belongs only to the body that physically covers the ground. Elsewhere, Finlay declares that "There can never be an excess of access." The line gives the collection’s politics a memorable directness. Access is not treated as an optional kindness or an adjustment to be added afterwards - a principle that changes the meaning of participation itself. The poet’s thresholds are therefore both physical and social: they include paths and boundaries, but also the assumptions that determine who can use them and whose experience of place is valued. I found the cumulative effect of motif, theme and manifesto – both lyrically and politically – reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
In comparison, Hill brings movement and stillness into the more intimate territory of family, care and emotional knowledge. In "Happiness," a mother "wheels her large son in his wheelchair beside the stony / river, round the lake." She believes she is going "in search of their / happiness," but the poem quietly revises that expectation: "this, however, is their happiness." The journey around the lake has no triumphant destination; its meaning lies in the shared circuit itself. Happiness is not waiting at the end of the route or dependent upon some future change. It is already present in the act of accompaniment: in the movement beside the river and around the lake. In "The Body in the Bungalow," stillness takes on a more troubling quality. A man has been lying alone, "probably in pain." When a woman asks whether the pain might "not have been that bad," the doctor replies: "All pain is pain." The answer is simple but uncompromising. It marks a threshold in understanding: another person’s suffering cannot be reliably measured from the outside, nor dismissed as it is not fully visible. The final poem, "Unhappiness," also considers the limits of what one person can know about another. The speaker reflects that "All adult men have had their hearts broken" and therefore "he, too" must have experienced heartbreak, although "we don’t know how or when." The phrasing insists upon the son’s adult emotional life, while "we don’t know" protects his privacy. Hill implies that closeness and care do not give complete access to another person’s inner world.
The collections differ in their thresholds: Finlay’s are spatial and social, shaping who can participate, while Hill’s are psychological, marking the limits of knowing another person. Both resist the idea that freedom means constant forward movement. Finlay presents stillness as active and connected; Hill shows movement as circular and unresolved. In each, thresholds become places where agency, knowledge and relationships are rethought. What distinguishes these books is also the strength of their voices. Finlay’s inventive, concept-driven work reimagines access and place, whilst Hill’s compressed lyricism captures care, pain and intimacy without simplifying them.
The books are also compelling as physical objects. Their visual and tactile qualities are not incidental but shape the pace and meaning of the reading experience. Finlay’s playful movement between poetry, manifesto and visual composition asks the reader to pause, adjust and approach the page in different ways. Hill’s compact landscape format, accompanied by some strikingly simple but haunting artwork, suits a collection concerned with circuits, boundaries and uncertain passages. Taken together, The Walkative Revolution and Two Women in a Car Park are two highly original contributions to contemporary poetry. They are the work of distinctive and compelling voices, but also beautifully conceived and produced books that reward close attention.
Dr Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, researcher and lecturer. His interests include dystopian literature, queer studies, children’s fiction and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in a wide range of print and electronic media, and fiction titles he recently worked on as commissioning editor have won regional readers’ and publishers’ awards. His debut novel, Sisters of the Pentacle, was published by Hermitage Press in 2022, and his first non-fiction title, Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall’s Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity was published by The History Press (June 2026), to great acclaim.
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