Saturday 14 March 2009

Archipelago

Issue three of Clutag Press's ARCHIPELAGO has just appeared, featuring the first publication of Gurney's poems, 'Praise of Britons' (1922/24), 'Crickley Height' (1922/24), 'Crickley Cliffs' (1925) and 'First Framilode' (June 1925), as well as a wonderful, previously unpublished essay 'On Sailing a Boat on Severn', accompanied by an essay by yours truly. Visit www.clutag-archipelago.com to order your copy and to find out more about this remarkable publication; a publication the brief for which is described as follows:
'Extraordinary will be its preoccupations with landscape, with documentary and remembrance, with wilderness and wet, with natural and cultural histories, with language and languages, with the littoral and vestigial, the geological, and topographical, with climates, in terms of both meteorology, ecology and environment; and all these things as metaphor, liminal and subliminal, at the margins, in the unnameable constellation of islands on the Eastern Atlantic coast, known variously in other millennia as Britain, Great Britain, Britain and Ireland etc; even, too, too readily, the United Kingdom (including the North of partitioned Ireland), though no such thing ever existed, other than in extremis during wartime, but in the letter. But while the unnameable archipelago is its subject, its vision is by implication global, and its concerns with the state of the planet could not be more of the hour.'

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