‘Lines on the map and lines of text making up the index of human identity are one and the same thing.’

Martin Hudson (Landscapes Journal)

Landings (2009-2019)

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’.

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.

The result is both an oblique and poignant testimony to personal grief and a meditation on 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.

Landings was exhibited at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, in 2011.

ISBN 978-1-9999718-5-4 | Xylem Books | 326pp

[Landings at Corbel Stone Press]