I know there are quite a few of you who enjoy a quality literary journal, especially one that is a little different.
I am already on the edge of my seat waiting for the second volume of Elementum A Journal of Nature & Story due for publication in December. The first has been a really worthwhile investment, read many times over and full of inspiration...in fact perhaps it was Elementum that set me off on that trail of whale reading recently.
So I took a chance on another journal that I had heard about, Reliquiæ from Corbel Stone Press...
Incidentally I warm to the name Corbel Stone Press with its connotations of solid support and weight-bearing capacity. Corbels skilfully inserted into our 150 year old cottage, the stone a comforting and much-loved feature in the kitchen and still (hopefully) doing a grand job. Once in place corbels are structures of strength and permanence.
Reliquiæ is an annual journal of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, translations and visual art, edited by Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton. Each issue collects together both old and new work from a diverse range of writers and artists with common interests spanning landscape, ecology, folklore, esoteric philosophy and animism.
I pre-ordered my copy and am delighted to find this means my name is included as one of the many who made this edition possible and what a lovely thing it is to see and to hold, arriving beautifully wrapped in tissue paper.
Browsing the contents I read Ice Voices - An East Greenlandic Ice Core by Robert Macfarlane three times over before I fully understood the whole notion of creating a piece of writing that represents a form of core sample and with contributions from many writers...
'Ice cores are cylinders of ice drilled out of an ice-sheet or glacier and studied for the archive they contain of past atmospheric conditions...the oldest continuous ice core records from Greenland extend 123,000 years back.'
The page layout, described as 'a scaled version of a single bag' suddenly became clear, as did the explanation that ice core samples are divided up into 'bags' a typical one measuring ten centimetres in diameter by one hundred and fifty centimetres in length. I might be the only nerd to take a tape measure to the page and find that it measures approximately half that. Such attention to detail, the written piece perfectly and oh so cleverly scaled and with its 'samples' from a wide range of authors.
'Ice has a memory, and Greenland's
ice is a two-mile time machine
Places that are frozen today may not
remain frozen tomorrow A glacier is
what it becomes as well as what it
has been '
Cue another gratuitous picture of the Franz Josef glacier on South Island, New Zealand while I think about that for a minute...
Reliquiæ promises plenty more mindful and thought-filled reading to come so all in all a good and recommended discovery.
Recent Comments