Showing posts with label Robert Macfarlane. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Macfarlane. Show all posts

Sunday, 21 September 2014

New Gerry Loose - Fault Line

You can catch the launch of Scottish poet Gerry Loose's new book Fault Line at Waterstone's in Glasgow Argyle Street at 6.30pm on Wednesday 24th September 2014. Or available online now.

Robert Macfarlane says:

"fault line is a very special piece of work. It feels as if this is a book born of a decade or more's looking and watching (surveillance). I relish the form: field-note, jotting, face-off, counter-movement. There's movement across the sequence, but no neat arc, and somehow over 100 pages there's no sense of repetition in the sense of stagnation, though of course the whole is bound and patterned by its recurrences - the white hart, the wild-flowers, the subs. Words flit and slide, 'fault' is not pure division but a kind of friction and slippage that is productive of vision as well as signalling separation and mutual harm. The atomic dark-stars of the submarines versus but also because of the glowing white deer. It's a poem - poems - of menace and mixture and anger, that finds its way into the immense complexities of contemporary 'nature', recording the beauties born of collision, while also keeping room for 'old aesthetics'. I heard shades of Buile Suibhne, hints of Mercian Hymns, though it is of course its own thing also. And there, too, were glimpses of domestic life lived on amid all this: kindling split, beans shelled, sights seen - the registration of 'enduring beauty' hard up against 'danger of death'.


Or find out more here https://www.facebook.com/events/806497846061794/.

Sunday, 4 May 2014

Purposeless walking

A very mainstream article on The slow death of purposeless walking surprised me.



First this was such an urban-fed and middle class idea. The very meat and drink of the colour supplement (in its online form in this case). Has the writer had to walk to dead-end work or rubbish school or anywhere? Day after day. Had nothing to come home to. Had no home? Lived in the country and had to walk everywhere. Walked to hitchhike? Has the writer had nothing else to do? If you cannot afford to pay for entertainment or shelter walking is an end itself keeping you warm and with at least the promise that something will turn up. And you can own the space you make if nothing else.

But second has the writer not investigated the artistic practice of any modern writers or artists - he quotes the usual suspects Emerson and Wordsworth but somehow that is where such articles always end their investigations. You don't however have to look further than Robert MacFarlane's equally mainstream (from a Borders' viewpoint) The old ways which contains a whole chapter on the purposeless walk - which has a name in Scotland - stravaiging. And some insight into artists and writers gleaning ideas - or any thinkers- using the structure and space of a walk; a mathematical shape to frame or reveal or draw up ideas.

One day this process might have a mechanical or digital embodiment but for now walks come cheap and plentiful. So this is why we see an attempt to market them; brand them with an identity that can then be sold back to us. I expect next the arrival of the purposeless walk shoe.

Until then, you can read the BBC article here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27186709 or find out more about Robert MacFarlane's book here http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/02/old-ways-robert-macfarlane-review,

Friday, 12 April 2013

Stravaig Scottish geopoetics

Issue 2 of the the online journal of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics is out now and features new work from Scottish poets and writers including Elizabeth Rimmer (who also edited this issue), Bridget Khursheed and Susan Richardson.

Stravaig is a Scots word meaning a special kind of walk or tour; infinite and open-ended and minded...Robert Macfarlane gives a good definition in his book The Old Ways.


You can view it here http://www.geopoetics.org.uk/online-journal-stravaig/stravaig-issue-2/