Landings (10th Anniversary Edition) (Richard Skelton)

‘One of the key works of 21st-century English-language landscape art/writing’. (Justin Hopper)

 

Landings is a book about the West Pennine Moors in Lancashire, Northern England. Beginning with a single place-name, Anglezarke, it circles around the faint traces of moorland lives as they appear in the public record — in maps, gazetteers, census and parish records — accumulating a poetry of testimony, of lists and litanies, ‘to hold against the forgetful earth’. 

 

‘A pained record-keeping of the Anglezarke moor – a textual summoning-back of its lost and forgotten … litanies spoken against loss’. (Robert Macfarlane)

 

Landings mixes an autobiography of diary excerpts, poem fragments and essays with these inventories of names and dates, creating a mosaic of seemingly disparate elements that are drawn into association across the landscape of the page. Just as the moor is a patchwork of hills, streams, paths and the remnants of human lives, so the book incorporates many and various kinds of writing into its greater body.

 

‘A sustained reflection on the nature of land and biography. … An idiosyncratic archiving of local topographies and the secrets they hold.’ (Martyn Hudson)

 

Crucially, Landings documents Skelton’s embodied use of music as way of coming to know a place; as a form of call-and-response, and as a way of giving voice that which is hidden or overlooked. In particular, Landings describes his use of field recordings as a reflexive and recursive way to encounter the land and its other-than-human agencies.

 

The result is a deep mapping of Anglezarke Moor and its environs, a meditation on grief, 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. 

Accompanying the texts of Landings is a series of musical compositions recorded by Skelton over a period of years at sites of resonance across Anglezarke and the surrounding hills, woods and fields. 

 

Three albums were recorded, the first in 2006, the second in 2009, and the third in 2011. There are fourteen compositions in total, all of which are available as a single digital download album, The Complete Landings, to accompany the book.

 

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THE COMPLETE LANDINGS
by Richard Skelton

1. Stolen Ground
2. Noon Hill Wood
3. Scar Tissue
4. Threads Across the River
5. Green Withins Brook
6. Of the Last Generation
7. Undertow
8. Voice of the Book
9. Rapture
10. Pariah
11. River Song
12. Remaindered
13. The Shape Leaves
14. Rapture (Reprise)

Total Running Time: 138:08

 

Note: the music is accessible via a download card that accompanies the book.