Notes on the Landscape (II) (Richard Skelton)

16pp booklet
Cahier-stitched by the artist
Loose French-flap cover
Paste-on artwork
Embossed logo to cover
Sewn-in original collage by the artist
Unique poem card
Signed colophon card
Music CDr of Scaleby, XII

 

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Edition of 12 in one of four colours

Notes on the Landscape (II) represents something of a return to our roots, as it’s the first hand-made artist’s edition we’ve produced in quite some time. The work itself is the next installment of an embryonic series of prose-poems begun in 2012, and a form of hybrid writing that Paul Sheehan identifies as evincing the aesthetics of hauntology, bespeaking ‘a secret relationship that hinges on the notion of the palimpsest’.

 

Notes on the Landscape (II) moves its focus away from the history of Lancashire to the frayed edge between the Scottish Borders and the old county of Cumberland:

​    Corpse Act. The coaled north. Opencast,
    the oldest layer. Churchways, weave-damaged.
    Weftsides likewise spun. Rivers, admixtures
    of wool, sphagnum, amber. Approximate
    threads.All questions of dates are vague. The
    map-makers were wrong.

​The poem reads like a heretical treatise on the geography of the north; an unflinching account of the sedimentation of fact, fiction and myth. Its ruptured, poetic logic sheds slant light on the supposed veracity of official histories, excising ambiguities from authoritative texts and casting them adrift in its slurry of signifiers.