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

Justin Hopper

Landings (Appendices) (2011)

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’.

The third edition saw the book increase from 96 to nearly 300 pages, including almost 100 pages of notes and appendices. Written while living on the west coast of Ireland, its word-hoard can be seen as an attempt to reconstitute the landscape of the West Pennine Moors in textual form:

‘The archive that is Anglezarke has an unspeakably complex order of interrelations – its index is constantly being extended and recompiled. Each object is a nexus for multiple experiences, lives, energies – both consecutively and simultaneously. The land is in continual flux, from hay meadow to moor, valley to reservoir, hill-side to plantation. Buildings reconfigure themselves as walls, bridges and feeder conduits, or else they are assimilated into the bloated body of the moor itself, whose very name shifts over the centuries – Andelevesarewe, Anlauesargh, Anlewesearche. There is no rest.’ (Landings)

[Landings at Corbel Stone Press]