The Pale Ladder: Selected Poems & Texts (2009-2014) - Softcover

Skelton, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1999971833 ISBN 13: 9781999971830

Publisher: Xylem Books, 2018

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Skelton is an artist, musician and writer from Lancashire in northern England. His work is informed by landscape, evolving from sustained immersion in specific environments and deep, wide-ranging research incorporating toponymy and language, ecology and geology, folklore and myth. Between 2005 and 2011, he ran his own acclaimed Sustain-Release Private Press, publishing music under such names as A Broken Consort, Clouwbeck and Heidika. He currently runs Corbel Stone Press with his wife, the Canadian poet, Autumn Richardson.

Edition details

• Publisher: Xylem Books
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1999971833
• ISBN 13: 9781999971830
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272