Dark Hollow Dark Richard Skelton
ISBN 978-0-9934310-9-8

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‘I am lost I will not be found
I am lost I will not be found

...
I am her messenger of fire

her messenger of vire’

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Dark Hollow Dark is a sequel to, or emanation from, the author’s previous work The Look Away, taking as its inception two points of haemorrhage in the original text, the lines ‘its dark motion like a chant’, and ‘thoughts come to me that are not my own’. In fact, in some ways this new long poem could be viewed as a textual representation of the imminent flood that haunts The Look Away:

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‘Nothing is impermeable. There are fractures,
planes of weakness, wounds. There can be no
resistance. The current is too strong. In the end,
everything yields, surrenders, washes away.’

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Dark Hollow Dark is ‘a chant in seven parts’ and its voice, or voices, describe a form of extreme mental and bodily disorientation where the boundaries of the self and the other elide, where identity ebbs and flows between the clingingly obdurate and that which dissolves and disappears. The text itself draws on many sources, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and in particular a footnoted gloss on the original Cotton Nero manuscript referring to a word that is ‘rewritten, over stain, in another hand … in darker ink over another letter’.

These words become a refrain throughout the book, reflecting on the nature of individual volition and the sense that the story of our lives can be overwritten by unknown - and possibly supernatural - agencies. Indeed, Dark Hollow Dark is a haunting and haunted text, with its evocations (and invocations) of numinous entities residing in and beneath the earth, in the sky and stars, and ‘the seven worlds’. Many passages of the poem are hermetically addressed to persons unknown, including someone only referenced as ‘dweller’, and an unnamed goddess who is variously described as ‘the goddess of the silver bow’, ‘the goddess of silver’, ‘the goddess of fire’ and ‘the fire goddess’.

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Click here to download a sample chapter from Dark Hollow Dark (PDF).

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The palimpsestic nature of early texts such as MS. Cotton Nero are explored in a series of over thirty original artworks that accompany the text of Dark Hollow Dark. These artworks are themselves texts - largely drawn from The Look Away - each written and overwritten to create a dense mesh of symbols that hover on the threshold of meaning. These artworks are in turn  complemented by two new musical composition, A Great Body Rising and Falling and Another Hand, which evoke the undulating, ebbing and flowing rhythms of the book itself.