A little pile of my favourite sort of reading has accumulated so I thought I'd share the titles with you...
On the Marshes by Carol Donaldson and published by the inestimable Little Toller Books.
At a crossroads in her life, Carol Donaldson decided to take to the road and return to her old hunting grounds, travelling across the marshlands of North Kent from Gravesend to Whitstable. The inevitable journey of self-discovery evolves as Carol explores the world of people who have chosen to live 'on the edge of this lonely, beautiful waterland.'
One of the questions I am sure I have put to the male of the species when I have interviewed them in a previous life (I think I might have asked Robert Macfarlane this at Port Eliot Festival) is how much easier it is for men to upsticks, take themselves off, sleep under the stars and walk themselves into self awareness and insight, versus the women who often stay home to care for the children, or perhaps feel slightly less able to get out there and do all this...though this might just be my age and perspective talking here, I'd be interested to know your thoughts.
Meanwhile, Carol has no such truck with gender expectations, dons her rucksack and she's off and I am thoroughly enjoying a woman's perspective on the people she meets with the stories of her life woven in among 'the different ways we live on this tribally divided island.'
Waiting for the Albino Dunnock by Rosamond Richardson continues the trend for women to go on the journey... bookish information that follows is from You Know Where...
"Written by a beginner-birdwatcher with the freshness and passion of a convert,Waiting for the Albino Dunnock explores the world of birds through the seasons of a single year. It describes encounters with particular birds in the landscapes of East Anglia where the author is rooted. Occasional journeys farther afield take the reader to truly wild places in the Outer Hebrides and Eastern Europe. Yet the ordinary experience of birdwatching is also far more than just that. The beauty of birds has the power to change lives, as it did the author's, and as in the case of the all-but-legendary snow leopard, it is more about the search than the result.
Personal and elegiac in tone, the writing is an unusual combination of prose poems based on the actual experience of seeing a specific bird for the first time, woven with elements of science and wisdom traditions, ornithology (and its punning counterpart ornitheology), mythology and philosophy, taxonomy and history, literature and folklore, conveying the wider picture of what it means to be human in relationship to nature. Waiting for the Albino Dunnock explores the degree to which wildness is embedded in the human psyche and how beauty is central to our mental and emotional wellbeing, while highlighting the careless damage we are inflicting on the natural world."
I have become increasingly aware of my woefully inadequate knowledge of birds and bird song in recent weeks. Out on Dartmoor a bird flits past my Walking Friend and I and unless it's a recognisable bird, or a skylark, or a buzzard we call out, ' Oh there goes a Something Else.' Who knows what rarities we might have unwittingly seen.
Four Fields by Tim Dee has lain fallow (sorry) and unread on my reading pile for several years now, largely because I had the Small Print problem with the paperback edition. Since starting Beating the Bounds on here, and tithe maps and naming the fields around us I have been desperate to read this one. So desperate that I had a small moan in response to a glowing 140 characters written about the book by a reader on Twitter, and to which Tim Dee responded by very kindly offering to send me a hardback copy. People often don't follow up on promises like that but true to his word Tim did so I am really excited about finally being able to read this...
"In his first book since the acclaimed The Running Sky Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields. Four fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and their natural and human histories. Four real fields – walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable and knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested and changing. Four fields – the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life – looked at, thought about, worked in, lived with, written.
Dee’s four fields, which he has known for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his Cambridgeshire garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie field in Little Bighorn, Montana, USA, and a grass meadow in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild, to look at and think about the way we have messed things up but also to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass and fields."
It's all chiming with my recent discovery of Wendell Berry and the Textithe Map of course...
This was the prototype (note the join in the backing fabric which I cut too small... now a design feature) few tweaks to finish and then need to find some wall-space (an ongoing issue) but yes, fields and I are very good friends.
And the top-most book in the pile is Landings by Richard Skelton. I'll wager you might not have heard of this one. I caught news of it, again on Twitter, where Corbel Stone Press (run by Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson) were asking for pledges via crowd-funding to enable the printing of a new and updated edition, and so I bought a copy on the strength of this description because again it chimes with my Beating the Bounds project here...
"In 2009, Richard Skelton published his first book, Landings, a deeply personal and unique response to the moorland landscape of Anglezarke, near his birthplace in south-west Lancashire, UK. Written over the course of half a decade, the book is assembled from a diverse array of materials: texts excised from his own notebooks and diaries are combined with excerpts from census and parish records, maps and historical treatises. The result is what Skelton terms 'mosaic sequences [of] reclaimed fragments' - discrete but connected strands forming an oblique and poignant testimony to personal grief, a meditation on memory and forgetting, a conjuring of the ghosts and voices of a landscape, and an exposition of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on rural lives."
I too have a whole heap of disconnected fragments about discoveries within that one mile radius around our house here in the Tamar Valley; piles of notebooks, folders and files, tithe maps, field names, census returns, copies of deeds and documents found in the Devon Records Office dating back to the 1600s and thoughts and ponderings as I walk and wander, so I was intrigued to see what Richard Skelton had done with his. This might be the best £14 I have spent on a book in a while (since the last £14 anyway) because I am deeply immersed and feeling very in tune with Landings and with that sense of the seemingly disparate pieces making up the whole (nice patchwork analogy there). We expect a book to have a start, a middle and an end but this book of fragments reveals that there are threads to be found that can join them, and that whole-cloth will emerge (I'm stuck on the analogy now, sorry).
I wrote about Reliquiae 4, Corbel Stone Press's annual journal of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, translations and visual art a while ago here. It has proved to be one of those journals that bears revisiting and repeated reading as, I think, will Landings.
How lucky we are to have so much bookish inspiration to choose from and as always please do share any other recent finds on this theme in comments.
And if you have read any of these please do share your thoughts...
And what about the Kent Marshes...reading Carol Donaldson is tempting me to visit a place I don't know at all.
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