Book Review: Adrift by Helen Babbs

Babbs, Helen (2016) Adrift A Secret Life of London’s Waterways Icon Books ISBN 978 1 84831 920 2

Back in the mid-eighties I lived afloat on the London Cut, more specifically on the Regent’s Canal.

1987, the cabin of ‘Lily Jane’ a Thames slipper launch, and my first London home…

Any book about the Capital’s waterways will grab my attention. And, Helen Babb’s Adrift is a wonderful addition to the library of London canal literature.

Book Review: Traveling in Place by Bernd Steigler

Stiegler, B. (English Translation 2013) Traveling in Place University of Chicago Press ISBN 978 0 226 77467 1

Yet when all of earthly life is only a form of exile, the room journey – in whatever way it occurs – at least offers a form of security […]
pg. 20 Second Leg ‘Pilgrimages’, Traveling in Place

A curious book. Organised in 21 ‘legs’ or micro-essays. About a genre of literature – an oxymoron – ‘room travel’. A philosophical rumination, rich with curious characters and interesting ideas.

A Review of Uniformagazine

Colin Sackett’s Uniform Books’ quarterly Uniformagazine is a joy. A 215mm x 145mm, 32 page, limited edition, offset litho wunderkammer.

Cabinets of curiosities (also known as Kunstkabinett, Kunstkammer, Wunderkammer, Cabinets of Wonder, and wonder-rooms) were encyclopedic collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings), and antiquities. “The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater. The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron’s control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction.” Of Charles I of England’s collection, Peter Thomas states succinctly, “The Kunstkabinett itself was a form of propaganda.” Besides the most famous, best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe formed collections that were precursors to museums. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_curiosities

A sense of the content of Uniformagazine might be surmised from this quote from the forward to No. 3 written by Colin Sackett himself quoting from an essay called Numeracy, uniformity and structure (Dundee 1999):

“The language is distilled, precise and economical […]. The uniformity  of presentation highlights the variations and particularity of each combination of text and image – the singularity of each work is established by its relationship to other works.”

Book Review: Beyond the Fell Wall by Richard Skelton

Skelton, R. (2015) Beyond the Fell Wall, Little Toller Books ISBN 978 1 908213 29 7

Richard Skelton is a musician, poet, publisher.

This exquisite edition, a small book with grand ambitions is another in the outstanding Little Toller Monograph series and reflects Skelton’s half decade living in a valley in the weatherworn Furness Hills of Cumbria.

Book Review: On Silbury Hill by Adam Thorpe

Thorpe, A. (2014) On Silbury Hill Little Toller Books ISBN 978 1 908213 24 2

All impressive detective-work and field research aside, On Silbury Hill is a fine stand-alone memoir. But it’s more than that. It is a love letter, a homage to an object, a place and a symbol that has provided succour and mystery and hope and wonder – and will long continue to do so. Ben Myers reviewing On Silbury Hill on the Caught by the River website

Intimate, with more than a touch of a private scrapbook, the text of On Silbury Hill by Adam Thorpe, author of Ulverton, is an often beautifully written personal reflection on a Neolithic landscape about which very little is known or understood.

Book Review: R.F. Langley – Complete Works

“These journals are concerned with ‘what Ruskin advocated as the prime necessity, that of seeing’, and pay ‘intense attention to the particular’. They speak of wasps, of thrips, grass moths, stained glass, nightjars, pub lunches and church monuments, everything deeply informed by etymology, history, psychology and aesthetic theory. The prose is compressed and fierce, and its narrative movement is concerned with mapping the processes of thought, the working out of things. It is founded on careful, close observation of things that typically pass unnoticed through our world.” Helen Macdonald author of ‘H is for Hawk’

‘Not things but seeing things.’ R.F. Langley from the his poem Mariana

‘A sore neck touched by a ruggy shirt collar. Sticky hair. The breaks in sentences longer, this year. The eyes glazed in mid remark. The names vanish, and there is a yawn in the voice. What can string all this together?’

Poet and diarist Roger Francis (R. F.) Langley (1938-2011) was not a prolific poet, seventeen poems in one collection, twenty one in another, a further eight uncollected. That’s it.

Book Review: Underlands by Ted Neild

‘Expansive and enthusiastic, brimming with insights and extraordinary details, Underlands is a dispatch from the Deep Time of geology. In guiding you through the unseen world below us it delivers what the best books do: a transformation in perspective’
Gavin Francis

Nothing could be colder and more impersonal than a book on geology and nothing could be further from the truth here. We live among the remnants of coal, stone, oil, rock and clay extraction. Our mines are gone, our building stone is no longer local, yet spurred on by erasure – of history and industry – Ted Nield explores the land beneath our feet – our articulate, buried landscape – delving into the history and geology of Britain and into his ancestors’ connection to its rocks, exploring as he goes what the loss of kinship between past and present means for modern-day Britain.

Book Review: Walking Inside Out ed. Tina Richardson

“Psychogeography does not have to be complicated. Anyone can do it. You do not need a map, Gore-Tex, or a companion. All you need is a curious nature and a comfortable pair of shoes. There are no rules to doing psychogeography – this is its beauty. However, it is this that makes it hard to pin down in any formalised way. It is also this ‘unruly’ character (disruptive, unsystematic, random) that makes for much discussion about its meaning and purpose.” pg. 1 Tina Richardson on pg. 1 of the introduction to Walking Inside Out

Walking Inside Out attempts to nail the psychogeographic jelly to the wall.

Book Review: A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

Carr, J. L. (1980) A Month in the Country Penguin Modern Classics ISBN 978 0 141 18230 8

It’s a book that savours a lingering melancholy, that regret for a moment past. It’s a book about loss and healing. It’s poetic, compelling, haunting.

Book Review: Black Apples of Gower by Iain Sinclair

Sinclair, I. (2015) Black Apples of Gower Little Toller Monograph ISBN 978 1 908213 28 0

 

“My life’s journey was just beginning, even though I was close to its chronological finish. Nothing happened, nothing was real until I tapped out the first sentence. I would begin with the Horton swim. The deserted car park. The dunes. Anna hugging her knees, dozing off, and thinking her own thoughts. […] …dreams of Paviland stayed with me, unresolved. How was that to be managed?” p.130

Provoked by an enigmatic series of paintings made by Ceri Richards in the 1950s Iain Sinclair leaves his ‘London Project’ behind and, ‘carrying an envelope of black-and-white photographs and old postcards, along with fragments of memory…’, he walks the cliff top paths of his childhood in South Wales, rediscovering the Gower Peninsula.