Bøger udgivet af Xylem Books

Richard Skelton is an artist from northern England. Since 2005 he has produced a series of musical recordings and books that engage with the hidden histories and ecologies of specific landscapes. Landings is a collection of texts for the West Pennine Moors of Lancashire, UK, drawn from various sources, including historical treatises, maps, parish records, census data and the artist's own diaries, notebooks and essays. The book obliquely documents his use of music, writing and photography as means of 'colluding' with the various agencies of the land: the seen and the unseen, the heard and the unheard, the 'real' and the imaginary, the living and the dead. Originally published in 2009 as a modest 96-page book, Landings has grown over the ensuing years as it attempts to record, transcribe and archive the voices of the here and now, the lost and forgotten.

Three years in the making, Heart of Winter is a beautiful and poignant series of found poems by Autumn Richardson, assembled from the notes written by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen and botanist Dr. Thorild Wulff during the Second Thule Expedition - a journey charting a little-known area of the far north-western coast of Greenland, from April to September, 1917. Some of Rasmussen's journals were afterwards edited by himself, and published as Greenland by the Polar Sea in 1921. During this expedition they traversed a vast landscape, by foot and by sledge, travelling more than a 1000 kilometres. A large portion of their journey was spent crossing the perilous and desolate 'inland-ice', an earlier term for the Greenland Ice Sheet. Dr. Wulff sadly lost his life on the return journey, as did one other member of the expedition, Hendrik Olsen. Every dog they brought with them also perished.These poems are accompanied by a selection of Inuit songs, originally documented by Knud Rasmussen and published as Snehyttens Sange in 1930. Rasmussen's Danish versions are republished here alongside new English translations by Autumn Richardson. Heart of Winter is completed by an author's preface, nine botanical plates featuring Arctic flora, and a detailed index listing the plants recorded by Dr. Wulff in his Greenland diary.'The writings of Rasmussen, the Inuit songs, and the final notes of Dr. Wulff, share moments of life at its slimmest, its most immediate. Each recount life-threatening and life- sustaining experiences, and the endurance of incredible hardship, yet in their words there is also at times a euphoria; an awareness of the immense beauty surrounding them, and a recognition of the preciousness of each small life that they encounter.' (from the author's preface)

The Pale Ladder collects the majority of Richard Skelton's poetic writing since 2005, including work first published in 2009 through his own Sustain-Release Private Press, and selections from the Corbel Stone Press catalogue, including writing co-authored with Autumn Richardson - an endeavour which must surely constitute one of the most significant and sustained small press collaborations of recent years.Over one hundred poems and texts are reprinted in The Pale Ladder, including work from many long out-of-print and limited edition titles. In gathering these various works together for the first time, it is possible to glimpse the artist's overarching themes - the interconnecting threads - and to plot their development. Key among them is the desire to observe, to bear witness and to record the testimony of the land itself, through its many and varied agencies - its topography and weather, its flora and fauna, its place-names and dialects, and its records and archives.Martyn Hudson describes this as "a sustained reflection on the nature of land and biography" - an "idiosyncratic archiving of local topographies and the secrets they hold". Crucially, he identifies Skelton's focus on the "borders between the human and the non-human, and between actuality and imagination", and it is this attention to what lies beyond material reality that characterises much of Skelton's work - his willingness to give voice to the countless others; the land's heretical and supernatural voices.

A wounded man in a fugue state hides out in a deserted north-country shieling, convinced that he is pursued. Over the days and weeks that follow, as no one comes to claim him, his mind turns from his pursuers to the hills themselves, and their other-than-human inhabitants. Gradually he is caught up in a drama that can have only one conclusion.After nearly a decade of writing poetry and non-fiction, Richard Skelton has arrived at a form that is most like the music for which he is well-known: the slow accumulation of mood and atmosphere, the repetition of stark phrases, the bleak beauty, the loam and grit. In The Look Away, Skelton has written a powerful, intensely bleak, yet redemptive, novella that redraws mythic lines and repositions humanity in a more complex and ambiguous relationship with the natural world.