Photo Essay: Notes from the Mediterranean, by Rafael Quesada

By Rafael Quesada:

In the south of Spain overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, a small village by the name of Aguadulce is where I grew up. Much like the neighbouring villages along the coastline it was filled with river beds as dry as the desert, structures long abandoned, exotic palm trees, slow sunsets and late summers of emptiness.

It was 11 years ago when I left home to explore the world. I return yearly to visit my loved ones and I spend my time exploring the neighbouring places of the Mediterranean. Discovering them is hauntingly familiar to me as I feel the time go by, and yet see the places around me staying eerily the same.

Notes from the Mediterranean is a personal exploration of a place that used to be my only home. A return to fond memories and a creation of new ones.

Rafael Quesada is a Spanish self-taught photographer and professional designer currently living and working in The Netherlands. Moved by the urban environments and forms of landscapes, his photography is mainly focus on personal topics and explorations of the relationship with his surroundings.

Book Extract: Twisted Mountains by Tim Woods

We are extremely proud to present this extract from the story ‘Offcomers’ from the new collection Twisted Mountains by our very own Tim Woods. Twisted Mountains is a collection of short stories set among the hills of Scotland, England and Wales, with each story telling the tale of someone who has their own reason for being in the mountains, from a vengeful student to a wannabe biker and Wainwright expert with a secret. ‘Offcomers’ concerns an obsessive hotel owner, what money can buy and who owns the views of high places…

It is the most striking view in the country, of that there is no question. Today, exactly one year on from our grand reopening, it is at its most remarkable – a mountain alive with autumn colour. Its flanks are cloaked with russet bracken, which stops sharply at the dark band of woodland. Beyond, the tetrahedral fells melt into one another, each a little hazier than its predecessor. The lake that separates the mountain from me reflects all of this, doubling the splendour.

The first time I saw it, in February two years ago, I knew I had to have it. Although on that day, I would have happily taken any view on offer – anything to distract me from the interminable board meeting in which I was trapped.

The purpose was to agree exactly how many redundancies the company would need to make that year, and our declining prospects were evident in the choice of venue: a run-down hotel set two hundred metres back from the lake. The kind of place that tries to add a touch of glamour by providing cheap sparkling wine with lunch, no doubt trusting its regular clientele won’t realise it is nowhere even close to champagne. The whole charade was utterly tiresome and I resented being part of it, especially as I had already informed my fellow executives of my decision to retire. None of the redundancies would be my responsibility, so there was no need for me to be involved. Yet there I was, trapped in an increasingly aggravated discussion about unions, corporate responsibility and two-yearly forecasts. 

***

I passed the time staring out of the window and across the water. The small thicket of trees on the near shoreline prevented a clear view, yet I was still able to observe how the mood of the mountain opposite changed with each passing hour. Its still-snowy summit accentuated the cold grey-green of its flanks, while the strip of white cloud ravelling down its face accentuated its nuance and depth. Birds glided effortlessly on the hyaline water between us, leaving dissipating arrowheads behind them. As argument and counterargument raged around me, I knew that I had to have this view. To own it. To decide who got to share it and who didn’t. I blocked out all else and began to formulate my retirement plan.

At sunrise next morning, I walked down to the lake. I needed to see it again, at its earliest hour, just to be certain. Passing flower beds showing the first shoots of daffodils – such an uninspiring choice – I headed for the bench a little further up the shore. Unobscured by the trees in front of the hotel, the view from here was even finer and the mountain somehow even more spectacular. The sun crept up behind me, illuminating the eastern face inch by inch and painting it with a fresh palette, one of brown and purple and orange, scorched through with thick black shadows cast by its ridges and folds, a shifting show of shadow puppets. The singularity of this view was confirmed by the photographers jockeying for position on the grass around me, some even waiting in line for their turn in the prime spot. Even the joggers paused to take their own mental snapshots.

It is possible to have everything in life and still want more. Once back in London, I could not stop obsessing about the view imprinted so vividly on my mind. During those long final weeks before retirement, I set out the details of my new project: a fully refurbished hotel, five stars and fine dining in place of the shabby old relic where I’d been forced to stay. Something exceptional for those who not only deserve it, but can also afford it. It was just what the region needed: a taste of the top-end, an overdue injection of style and refinement. An alternative to the washed-out places that still, even now, proliferate around here, somehow surviving on two-for-one weekend deals and ten-pound lunches. By contrast, my hotel would be perfect. And the perfect hotel demands the perfect view.

***

Too many people dismiss us wealthy as being materialistic. It is a lazy insult, painting us as fools who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is also incorrect: we can appreciate the beauty of the natural world as readily as anyone else. The lower classes have long thought they had an exclusive moral right to enjoy the countryside, ever since they set off on their trespass over Kinder Scout. Yet the key word there is trespass: they were not supposed to be there. Would we have defended it so fiercely if we had not also valued it? No, the wealthy have the right to enjoy England’s beauty too. Anyone with money has worked to earn it, or toiled still harder to keep it. We deserve the chance to enjoy what it can buy, and exclusivity is part of enjoyment.

***

The complaints began even before our first month was through. The dining hall had no privacy, said the guests, as the huge windows meant that people passing by could watch them eat. Others said it was too cold in there. Which was nonsense, of course, and I even installed an antique thermometer to assuage their doubts. But a landscape of frost-capped fells can, it seems, make people feel cold, even in the confines of a fully insulated and expensively heated building. And people are so very eager to share imagined discomforts in lieu of any actual ones. Even those who didn’t complain failed to appreciate what they were experiencing, with eyes more commonly fixed on their phones, their food, or occasionally their companions. Anywhere other than my mountain. 

They also failed to appreciate the master suite. Complaints ranged from the noise of the diners below to the smells from the kitchen, and again the imagined cold. Yet as autumn changed to winter, by far the commonest cause for complaint on those insufferable online review websites was the dining hall windows, my Italian-made, nine-foot-high windows. There’s too much sunlight; the rain is too loud; why are there no blinds to stop people looking in… The unique opportunity to admire the finest view in the land was never remarked upon. Not once.

The final straw came during that first winter. Bookings were below half-occupancy and I had already been forced to lower prices after less than four months of operating. As I passed through the reception on my way to meet, and possibly sack, my manager, I heard someone complaining at reception. He was rich, arrogant and trying to impress a woman who was clearly only with him for weekends away in expensive country hotels. But the nature of his grievance hit me like a fist: he didn’t like the view. For three hundred and fifty pounds, he expected more than just a lake and a mountain. The girl on reception tried to placate him, but I cut her off before she had even completed her sentence. Give them a full refund as long as they leave immediately. I won’t let anyone talk about my mountain like that, especially not in my own hotel. 

It was clear to me by then that somehow, somewhere along the way, I had got it wrong. My vision was wasted on other people, whether rich or poor. I summoned my team of architects once more and explained what needed to be done.

***

The trees I felled and promised to replace have finally taken root, although rather than doing so in a nearby field, they now form a neat row between the old hotel buildings and the sparkling new construction near the water. The latter is now my residence, and quite possibly the most expensive private home in the country. The master suite is my bedroom, and the dining hall – my brilliant, beautiful dining hall – is the office from which I now manage the hotel myself, ensuring it matches the tastes of the lower classes. Once grown, those trees will become a barrier, affording me a little privacy from the riff-raff who now comprise my clientele. More importantly, they will block off all views across the water for anyone except me. Never again will my guests be confronted by a mountain too grand for them to behold, or be disturbed by a majesty they cannot appreciate. That burden is now mine, and one I bear alone. 

***

You can order your copy of Twisted Mountains via Little Peak Press. 

Searching for home beneath the horse chestnut

By Jennifer Carter:

I smelt my success before I saw it. It was the smell of the demise of fresh green leaves into brittle, curled objects that just about resembled their original shape. They were scattered across the ground. Some were almost completely rotted, whilst others lay proudly, showing off the intricate veins where their rich colours seep into one another. A paint palette of mahogany, rust, and amber.

It was the smell of Autumn.

One of my big ambitions whilst away, inland, was to collect conkers for my four-year-old daughter. I was elated to find them within only a few hours of arriving. Scrabbling around the damp, leaf littered ground, I tried to find the biggest, smallest, and smoothest. My hands were numb with cold as I unzipped the bag to place them all safely inside.

I heard a familiar thud. A conker, still in its shell, fell from the branches which leaned over me and hit the ground. That blunt, seemingly insignificant sound threw me straight into a vivid memory.

The memory of traipsing around the dell, at least that’s what we called it: a small valley in an area of parkland behind my childhood home in the Midlands. There was a mysterious old brick building there, surrounding a deep hole shut off by a metal grate, and one of the biggest horse chestnut trees I have ever seen. My mother, father, brother and I would go there every autumn, looking for conkers. I remember fondly the moments of finding a whole one, still in its shell. I would proudly squash it between my shoe and a bit of hard ground, cracking it so I could reveal the rich, dark brown fruit, fresh enough to still glow where the golden pattern adorned it.

Every year in Falmouth I look for conkers, but the sea air prevents them from developing. I moved there from the midlands 10 or so years ago, and at the time I couldn’t resist the sandy beaches, warm microclimate and laid back inhabitants of the transitional student and holiday town. But the place I had started to call home didn’t excite me anymore. The coastal environments which are so sought after, so popular for holidays, praised so highly every time mentioned, I found dull and expired.

Standing in a field surrounded by towering trees, it made sense why. I was exhilarated by being in a place where the seasons were true to how I remembered experiencing them as a child. A place where I could hear birdsong which wasn’t drowned out by the harsh calls of Herring Gulls. A place where the air wasn’t so thick with salt that chestnut trees couldn’t bear fruit.

Suddenly I noticed the distinct call of a nuthatch. I found it straight away, making its way up one of the vast trunks behind me, flying into a neighbouring tree, and continuing its journey upwards. I cherished the still, cold air, the silence, and the time to reflect on where I belonged.

***
Jennifer is a writer and photographer based in Falmouth, Cornwall. Combining a love of wildlife with her passion for life writing, Jennifer’s work often reflects on how our environment can impact the way we think and feel. She is currently studying towards an MA in Travel & Nature Writing. You can find more of her work on her website.

Walking cities with my mother

By Anandi Mishra:

Earlier this year during the covid-19 lockdowns in Delhi, I realised how much I had always loved walking not knowing why so. Flipping through old photo albums, I found photographs of myself walking in various cities. A friend or a boyfriend, always someone clicking me from the back, as the city spread itself out before me. Consuming walking nostalgia from the pre-covid era, reading different kinds of writing about walking, listening to podcasts about it, eventually I started dreaming about it. In one of those dreams, an ancient, grainy visual played. A memory from my childhood returned. My mother walking five or six steps ahead of me, as we both made our way to the nearby market in my hometown in north India, Kanpur. Watching her walk, always trying to keep pace with her, I had memorised the vision – always her walking, walking ahead, walking to or from, and me trying to follow, match her stride. That’s when I remembered how she was the one who had taught me mapping places on foot, implicitly, all throughout my childhood. 

As a working woman in the 80s and 90s of north India, my mother defied several social odds. She was married, had two kids, an extended set of in-laws to take care of and an entire household to run, yet she chose to work. In addition to that, bereft of any personal vehicles, and due to the general plight of public transport in Kanpur, she walked to most places. So much so that walking became an extension of her personality. As I started going to school, she took me along, to accompany her on most such walks.

In those times (as now) to most people, walking was the very antithesis of existing in a city as a woman. It meant a certain slowing down, attentive step by step discursive engagement with the immediate surroundings that we were meant to avoid altogether in the first place. While on such walks, several times, men shouted at us telling us to hop on their cars or bikes, or to talk to them – but my mother carried on unperturbed, too consumed in the pleasures of her walk to respond to anything.

My predominant memory of walking with my mum when I was little is how fast she walked. Walking with her, I too quickly learned to look both ways and to run across the street, pace myself out of a thick crowd and never get lost.

This was in the decades before we knew of the concept of the flaneur or flaneuse. Now as I try to recall those formative experiences of walking, Walter Benjamin’s writing comes to mind. “The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls…. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.” If not in the same length, breadth or depth, but my experience of consuming the city was somewhat the same. 

*

As we entered the twenty first century, the danger of getting lost and disconnected in technology loomed large. People fretted on the urban dweller’s dependence upon it and that it would mean an erosion or indefinite derailment of contact with others and nature. We were afraid that humans would be another notch removed from consciousness as the individual will no longer touch or be touched by what once was most natural. These fears eluded me, as I continued walking even into my late twenties. 

I experienced a strange joy in being alone on the streets of various cities, at odd hours, walking with my phone in hand. I used the phone to record what I saw around. I wrote, took photographs and videos. It was not as though I was lost, but as if I was losing myself to the city.

Benjamin writes about this: “Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling. Then signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest…”

This was similar to the meandering walks my mother took in her days. She would walk from

her office to the bookstore, to the temple and nearby sweet shop in the vicinity. Ambling, she would take in the surroundings, nod and wave and say hello to her friends and acquaintances who ran several of the businesses, who she had made friends with over the years. While accompanying her I had learnt these primal pleasures of walking, measuring a city up and down by putting one foot in front of the other.

To be able to call a place my own she taught me, required that we first stray into unfamiliar streets, at strange hours. The shock of the new, she said, will be disruptive at first, but it will also break the insulating, silken lining of culture and grooming, allowing me to sink my teeth into a new way of exploring a place. 

In walking thus so, we were able to transcend the immediate relationship of mother and daughter, and model a companionship as co-walkers. In pacing the city of my birth up and down, one foot before the other, my mother set an example for me before any of the modern day flâneuses, implicitly giving me permission to navigate my (or any) city on my own terms and make a place my own. Her constant insistence on walking, became a part of my body, culture and daily routine the way, as Garnette Cadogan writes in his seminal essay “Walking While Black”, “home became home”.

When I learned of the word “flânerie” it gave meaning and shape to my ways of reading the city by walking on foot. The Berlin flaneur Franz Hessel while writing about flânerie and flaneurs had said that they perceive passersby, streets, and fleeting impressions as the transitory signs of modernity. The more I read the more I unearthed the connections between flânerie and being a woman, and how female flânerie is a means of asserting female subjectivity in the public realm. 

In her book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London Lauren Elkin elaborates on that: “Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement. I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness. Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote.” 

That my hometown barely had any “walking infrastructure” did not deter my mother. In the remove of her strolls, she found solace. In sauntering, strolling, wandering, promenading, she created her own time. And I imbibed these learnings from here. To not rush through a walk as a commuter, or as a morning passenger running behind their bus.

In that way, all cities were immensely walkable. I loved pacing up and down the various soulless parts of towns, observing what was happening. Dull sidewalks were akin to the stage of a theatre. I saw people going about their odd jobs, sketchy businesses, small works, toiling away idiosyncratically. Watching people navigate through traffic, and other humans became my way of spending idle time. I invested hours in walking the sidewalks in big cities to get a broader view of how people live on the roadside, how the city is stitched together, the history and the present colliding at all times. On a drab day, walking through the melee of people that were always thronging the streets became my way of knowing my place in the world. And in the lockdown it felt poetically justified to remember that I had learnt it all from my mother.

***

Anandi Mishra is a Delhi-based writer and research communicator who has worked as a reporter for The Times of India and The Hindu. Her writing has been published by or is forthcoming in the Harvard Review, The Atlantic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Popula, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. She tweets at @anandi010.

Where the sun sinks and is caught

By Kenn Taylor:

The city has its grids
This is one where the sun is absorbed

The disc itself fades
far off in the distance
behind towers
behind seas
Here though,
bookended by two busy roads
of bars, restaurants, entertainment halls
Are running
as warps to their weft
smaller streets 
Taking you up and down
one of the city's few hills

A rare space of peace in the city
Quiet streets
some still Georgian
cobbled, mewsed
Punctuated by pubs nestling in corners
Pubs which give it lifeblood
Boxes of energy
in otherwise
often silent
throughfares 

This is one of those places in the city
though,
where the energy lies buried
waiting to be dug up

All the faded red brick
Cracked paving stones
Black painted iron
Even occasional marble
and contemporary pre-fab
capture the sun as it retreats 

As the gold and red bounces off surfaces
Reflects in dark glass
and double yellow lines
Brings brief heat to alley beer gardens and
casts shadows
long and lean 

Sweat pricks brows nearing the top
High enough to watch the disc
slide away from view
Leaving only the vast
blood and honey glow

As you look back down the
long straight vista
and up beyond it
to the distance
the buildings step down beneath 

That energy though
flowing through the streets
warp and weft
The ghosts of dwellers and idlers,
prophets and priests,
of the past 
Remains even after dark 

***

Kenn Taylor is a writer and creative producer with a particular interest in culture, community, class and place. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and City Monitor to Caught by the River, Entropy and Liverpool University Press.
www.kenn-taylor.com

This City Street

By Hannah-Louise Dunne:

For Conn.

There is a place in the middle of the city, where seagulls greet the morning light with throaty squaks. Here, the burgeoning bright of the day will blink your eyes open, unwilling, though they might be. Below the seagulls, the city is a zigzag of bricks. A red hue where the wide Georgian streets lie. Or the cold grey of the fresh rain-washed roads and car parks that guide commuters around the corporate zones. In other places, glass flashes up and into the morning light. A brash presence, wrapping the ever-rising office blocks in bold illumination.

This is where we live, baby, before you arrive. Where we first imagined you into existence in the curved oblong surrounds of our small city-centre flat. Home now to our whole world, where each day we marvel at how much you’ve grown. 

At one time, the city centre all around us was home to lots of people. Teeming groups of humanity, packed into the small square footage of the heart of the city. There were families of ten or more packed with no consideration for their health or safety into small one-roomed tenements down near the Four Courts. While up around the city’s grand squares, the newly wealthy and established aristocracy vied for prominence in the surrounds of the beautiful red brick of their tall proud townhouses.

Nowadays, the city streets are quieter. There are more offices and hotels here than people. More space for cars, conferences, tourists. Money, and more money, as the city reopens after the strange events of the last year and a half, and the streets slowly fill up with lines of traffic again and car horns beep into the midday stretch.

But if you look beyond the main streets, you can still catch glimpses of ordinary life. Of generations of families living together in the dark red brick of the flats close to Holles Street. Or families still dotted in the surrounds of the grand old houses of the city all along the tree-lined roads to Donnybrook. There are students and workers too, carefully sequestered from view in the shelter of mews houses, in unexpected apartments and studios situated above office buildings, down side-streets, and in the back of office buildings where you’ll find our small city-centre home.

It’s a funny looking place. I think most people who pass by are surprised to see a house there in the midst of the zig zag of car parks and cranes. But don’t let that shock you. There are many surprises to be found around here. Just down the road lies one of Dublin’s private parks. A sanctuary for the fortunate then and now, which we eyed with envy during the lengthy lockdown, where the lucky few could unlock the gate and luxuriate in all of that green space, as they snapped open cans of designer craft beer.  

Around that square, there are tall houses that once served as homes to some of our greatest artists. We have a print of one on the wall of our sitting room. He was the younger brother of W.B. Yeats. But truthfully, I like his work best of all the Yeats family. The bold colours of his paintings sing to me as I walk past their vast canvases on the calming walls of the nearby National Gallery. Just down the road from Jack B. Yeats along the side of Fitzwilliam Square, Mainie Jellett lived. She was one of Ireland’s first abstract painters. She saw the world and made sense of it in shapes of peculiar beauty. 

It’s not all grand houses here though. Outside our building, a charming man comes to sit each day to collect spare change from passing drivers. He mans the parking meter come rain, hail or sunshine and knows everything there is to know about what goes on around here from his perch at the bottom of the steps. When we go for our daily walks around Merrion Square, to admire the louche grandeur of Oscar Wilde’s statue once more, he regales us with tales of the street and keeps a close eye on your growth, telling me every now and then; ‘You’re getting bigger every time I see you.’ 

This is our part of Dublin, where we have watched the streets change each season.  The place where you emerged into existence.  It’s waiting here to welcome you home.

***

Hannah-Louise is a former journalist, turned advertising executive and writer, who is interested in the way our past and present intersect to form and shape us. She has written about family, places she loves, and formerly, celebrity culture, for national press publications, and is currently working on her first long-form fictional work (and growing her first child). You can follow her on Medium, or catch her avoiding books on the reality of childbirth as she searches for calm waters to swim in around Ireland.

The rhythm and movement of place: an interview with Jack Cooper

By Dan Carney:

Anyone familiar with Modern Nature’s compelling blend of psych, folk, prog, and pop will know that the band’s main songwriter Jack Cooper draws plenty of inspiration from the rhythms and movements of the places around him. Debut collection ‘How to Live’ explored the transition between the urban and the rural, while last year’s ‘Annual’ beautifully evoked the seasonal cycle. Forthcoming album ‘Island Of Noise’, available via the Bella Union label from November 19th, tells the story of an imagined island; its evolving landscapes, mysteries, and customs, as experienced by an outsider.  

‘Tributaries’, Jack’s recent guitar/saxophone collaboration with band mate Jeff Tobias, consists of two unhurried, minimal pieces inspired by Wicken and Debden Waters, streams that meet the River Cam near his home in Newport, Essex. Spidery note clusters and playful, conversational phrases give way to smooth harmonics and hanging, resonant silences, alternately restless then still. Instruments and melodies unite, separate, and then rejoin, perfectly capturing the babble, flow, and meander of natural streams. The result is one of the most beguiling and vital British experimental/improv releases of recent times. I was lucky enough to ask Jack all about it…

How did ‘Tributaries’ come about?

Over the last few years, I've become more interested in figuring out a language for making music like this - things accelerated when I started to play the trumpet and involve myself more in theory and notating for other musicians. My working relationship and friendship with Jeff has really given me a lot of confidence. His enthusiasm and openness has been inspiring and key to me exploring these different routes.

What did you set out to capture on the record?

It's difficult to explain, but more than anything I've written before, I feel it has achieved something that I'm not really able to articulate with words. I've had some nice messages from people conveying back to me what I think I intended, which is interesting. The intention behind the systems and score is very different from the finished pieces, because the intention there was to capture a conversation between myself and Jeff.

What was it about Wicken Water and Debden Water that inspired the two pieces?

On a surface level, these two bodies of water are fundamentally the same; two streams that feed the River Cam. But they are completely different in every way from one day to the next - depth, speed, the various life contained within - the molecules will probably never pass here again. So these pieces of music are similar in that they're never the same twice, but on a surface level they're the same. I've been making a film, a visual accompaniment to the new Modern Nature record and that's based around shots that highlight order or symmetry within the chaos of the natural world. I think that's something I'm trying to find - order within the chaos.

Jeff has said that the record is “based on systems written by Jack melding composition and improvisation”…

The systems have more in common with geometric patterns, based around what I consider to be a more logical tuning of the guitar. I improvise around them and from that a score is composed over a period of time. The performers devise an interpretation of the score and that's what you're hearing here. For these recordings the systems and then the score are really secondary to our interpretation, in that the aim is exploring a sort of melodic collectivism. The main consideration when performing the score and contributing to the overall work is to consider your own personal interpretation of what 'collectivism' means. If the foundation of the piece and its purpose is the 'main melodic theme' or the 'score', then how does your own interpretation of collectivism fit in with that and what can you contribute towards the end goal? What aspects of the score can your performance highlight, support or compliment and how can your use of rhythm, timbre, harmony and intent serve it best?

It’s evident on this record that you’re influenced by 1960s/70s left-of-centre British jazz/improvised music. Which of these artists are worth checking out, for people who may love Tributaries but not be familiar with them?

The music that has got me the most over the last couple of years is Philip Thomas' collection of Morton Feldman's piano music which came out via Another Timbre. I think the pace of the music made me realise how context is everything. With enough space between them, any two sounds can make sense. They've also just released a collection of John Cage's Number Pieces by Apartment House, which has a similar clarity. 

Are there plans to do more?

Absolutely, this is just the beginning really. First steps perhaps, but I'm currently working on a piece that's more involved in its composition so I'm getting to grips with how best to realise that and where to take it. I'm also working on new Modern Nature music as well and I think the lines between these two strands will probably blur a lot more over time.

How would you compare where you live now to where you were before, around the Wanstead Flats part of Epping Forest? 

It's easier to ignore the city here.

***

‘Tributaries’ album on Bandcamp: https://astributaries.bandcamp.com/album/tributaries 

Pre-order the forthcoming Modern Nature album ‘Island Of Noise’:
https://bellaunion.ochre.store/release/250629-modern-nature-island-of-noise 

***

Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also worked in academic psychology research, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Fossil-Chained Grounds

By R. M. Francis:

In July 2020 I took up an 18 month post as Poet in Residence for the Black Country Geological Society (BCGS). A role enabled by the University of Wolverhampton Doctoral College’s Early Research Award Scheme. Exploring the UNESCO Black Country Geopark I’ve written poems inspired by and set in these wonderful places.  The poems are creative responses to the environment, considering how the geological make-up of the land impacts, connects and clashes with the overlooked cultures of the region. 

The Black Country is famous for its role in the Industrial Revolution. Its industrial heritage forged unique and important communities and cultures. This, in many ways, was connected to the grounds that gave life to these cultures - the fossil and mineral rich grounds dating back to the Silurian era. One such fossil is Chain Coral; a now extinct form of colonising coral. Single cells branch off, forming helix, webs or chain patterns. This species colonised the area that was to become known as the Black Country. These fossil-chained grounds gave rise to the chainmakers, steelers and miners - the chain continues to be an important symbol of the region’s heritage, representing strong communal / cultural links. Chains run deep in the region’s cultural psyche - they run deep in the deep time soils.

These poems re-figure our relationship with the local environment; both in its surfaces and depths, the building materials and the forces that create them. This project considers these issues in an overlooked region, famed for its  'dark satanic mills', considering this in conjunction with conservation, ecology, sustainability, and new ways of experiencing place in the anthropocene.

The Mind Seemed to Grow Giddy By Looking So Far Into The Abyss of Time

This quotation is from John Playfair's observation of James Hutton's work and echoes the sublime experience of geopoetic travel and perception. The Black Country Geopark is a group of rich, lush and mysterious places; drifting through them with a geopoetic lens has profoundly impacted my own sense of place and heightened my passion for this region's history and culture. There is something special and astonishing in the experience of getting lost and being awestruck in sites that are just outside or on the edges of our everyday realms. 

Take West Park in Wolverhampton - here you'll find huge glacial erratics pitched in the park grounds like ancient totems. They travelled hundreds of miles during the glacial epoch, and are older still. A poignant reminder of the toddlerdom of humanity on Earth. You can touch this piece of ancient movements where kids play football, where dog walkers and joggers circulate, just minutes from Wolverhampton's bustle. The same can be said of Hayes Cutting; a fascinating dipping sequence tucked behind a rusted rail on the Industrial Estates of The Lye. Commuters, deliveries, school runs zip passed as it sits in almost invisibility.   

There is something atavistic in these sites, or something that summons and imbues atavism. I don't mean this in any negative way; I see it as a touchstone for reconnecting with our locales, lands and the Earth in a deep time context and with the tactile knowledge that runs down to the oldest parts of our biology. Alyson Hallett recognises this in her evaluations of human cultures' relationship to stones; “Since we’ve been on this planet, as humans, we’ve paid attention to the patterns of stars and the spirits that live in stones”.[1] Kenneth White talks about this, saying: "The geopoeticist is immediately placed in the enormous".[2] Francis Ponge stated "they sink into the night of logos - until finally they find themselves at the ROOT level, where things and formulations merge".[3] George Amar thinks about the embodied knowledge of reading the land "reading is like swimming or dancing [...] eskimos can read snow and nomads desert sand".[4] These are things that we can walk through, touch, see and smell, and in that, connect us to our region and our land in ways that are both intellectual and visceral. It is, like ancient wayfinding skills, embodied and physical wisdom.

Robert Brechon discuses the relationship between cognition and feeling and between self and landscape in context to the work of Fernando Pessoa:

[...] something shatters in the vision of the landscape. The exaltation of color, light and night turns against itself and falls back into the abyss of self-awareness. Intelligence takes over from emotion, which it unmasked after having caught it in the act of posing and imposture. All the symbols that the landscape suggests to the mind of the walker, far from filling it, complete the disenchantment. He can neither absorb the landscape nor let himself be absorbed by it. His conscience overflows the landscape on all sides, as the landscape overflows from his consciousness. There is no possible identification or consubstantiality between the mind and the world.[5] 

It seems Totem is exactly the right word for West Park's erratics, and I'd use it for the geological cuttings and other features across the region too: that which, with a strange sense of animism, calls and connects people and place.

*** 

Errare

They know their address, they don’t know where they are.
Kenneth White

West Park wanderer,
erratic and stiff,
exforms in shades
cast over pathways:
Eros pole, glacially 
guided from Arenig -
an arrow rebinding space.

Fred and Ken err perma-trias
tracks, check the state of chestnuts
and their own scape. Iss too icy still,
ay it, me mon. Them ay ripe. Shrug.

On to bowling green 
and their own Aegil, 
but never without a slight 
palm pat against wet Felsite - 
cosmos-pointing and terrafirmed,
enforming in firm attention - 
a honing farewell.

***

Thursday: Beacon Hill Quarry 

Our Roy said iss scarred - 
beautymarked by beacon fires,
Wrottersley’s luna scopings. 
He shepherds limestone ways,
lighting lens on knapweed, carline
ox-tongue, heeding optic glares
against hairstreak flutterings. 
Roy said, they’m rare, our kid,
rare beauts on beautmarked mount.
Thass why Sedgley Morrismen come
circlin’ among whitsun flames. 
Yo’ cor ave a beacon wi’out watchmen.
He lays the ley’s spine, supporting
steep steps. Sunrays make dirt glimmer,
magnifies silty mudstone and brown lime, 
lagoon shallowed in Gorstian days (if earth bones
know what days mean) and further to skeletal
stems of sea lily, bryophyte, velvet worm. Concestors,
hand holding, forward facing, tracing and traced in
Thunor’s forge, like me and my shepherd.

On Wolverhampton Road, we stop for fags at the BP
and sup a pint at the Mount Pleasant. He grandads me.
Reaches into pocket, hands me three black 
bubbled bibbles of clinker. Tarra’abbit he says.  

***

Lindworm

Lindworm under Leasowes
muddied brooke bank, tracking 
tended greens and walkways;
Shenstone etched in delicate circuit
where flow, rush, plunge quilts 
slow steps passed urn, bench, footbridge:
Soft drone of petrichor.

In calm it makes its goblin market,
unnoticed, unheard. Set in vermi-
oubliettes as Halesowen bypasses
flood engines on routes to Brum. 
Their own flow, rush, plunge. They
used to come 'ere, but they doh come
'ere no more. Lindworm under Leasowes
leaks its mulching bites under A458, no.9,
Whittington Road and Hawne Basin ...

… turning scoop wheel under lapal tunnel
its half-sleep churning grumble-growls
in Murder Ballad rhythm out to Dudley
and the leisure steps of Leasowes’ ramblers
feel skinshedding of lindworm mercy.

***

Overhanging

Olistoliths slump-slide
as resisting stresses buckle
and atavistic avalanches - submarine, 
like hangover guilt: 
that dew-drenched dawn 
when we grazed feet
along New Year frosts 
and we didn’t speak a word 
and we didn't hold hands 
and we didn't see anyone
and badgers were hibernating 
just like the trees - seem unstill. 
Up Dolerite dyke, the Heathen Coal 
underhung in extract where brittle 
bramble waits dusk-strike. She says, 
there's something in the extraction,
something seeding, imbedding, gulfing us.

***

R. M. Francis is a lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Wolverhampton and author of five poetry pamphlet collections. His debut novel, Bella, was published with Wild Pressed Books and his poetry collection, Subsidence, is out with Smokestack Books. Wild Pressed Books recently published his second novel, The Wrenna and he co-edited the book Smell, Memory and Literature in the Black Country (Palgrave). He is currently the Poet in Residence for the Black Country Geological Society.

***

Notes:

[1] Hallett, A., Stone Talks (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2019) p. 13
[2] White, K., ‘The Great Field of Geopoetics’ from The International Institute of Geopoetics: Founding Texts, https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/textes-fondateurs/8-le-grand-champ-de-la-geopoetique 
[3] Amar, G., ‘The Meaning of the Earth’ from The International Institute of Geopoetics:Geopoetic Notebooks, https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/cahiers-de-geopoetique/24-le-sens-de-la-terre  
[4] Amar, G., ‘From Surrealism to Geopoetics’ from The International Institute of Geopoetics: Geopoetic Notebooks, https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/cahiers-de-geopoetique/118-du-surrealisme-a-la-geopoetique
[5] Brechon, R., ‘Landscapes by Fernando Pessoa’ from The International Institute of Geopoetics: Geopoetic Notebooks, https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/cahiers-de-geopoetique/28-paysages-de-fernando-pessoa