Literary Reviews
Review: Gast Bouschet, ANARCH, London: Scarlet Imprint, 2023, ISBN 978-1-912316-77-9
In essence, ANARCH documents an ongoing process of profound personal transformation mediated by a four year long retreat in a forested landscape. Captured in fine writing and immersive photography, I cannot sufficiently commend the profundity of conception and execution that characterises this work.
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Review: Gordon White, Ani.Mystic: Encounters with a Living Cosmos, London: Scarlet Imprint, 2022
Ani.Mystic is a beautiful and informative work. But to read it is to embark upon a densely woven encounter. The sheer variety of voices that contribute to its fabric do not obfuscate, in any way, its message. Rather, they serve to pitch a distinctly perspectival challenge to the reader, to ingrained habits of thinking and being […]. The quality of its prose and the logic underpinning its argument are, respectively, stylistically well-polished and thoroughgoing; the choice and use of its various interlocutors a treasure chest of sources and ideas.
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Review: Richard Skelton, Stranger in the Mask of a Deer, London: Penned in the Margins, 2021
Richard Skelton’s latest work, Stranger in the Mask of a Deer, is a sustained, book-length exploration of the boundless metaphoric landscapes and symbolically rich deep-time of the mythical unconscious. Neoshamanic in conception as well as in terms of the artistic process employed to facilitate its emergence, the work consists of a symphonic sequence of interwoven poems whose varied narrative voices – poet, ancestor, the other-than-human – nevertheless retains its thematic unity through the carefully crafted waft and weft of its recurring leitmotifs.
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https://www.paralibrum.com/reviews/stranger-in-the-mask-of-a-deer-by-richard-skelton
Review: Autumn Richardson, Ajar To The Night, Scarlet Imprint, London 2020
Ajar To The Night comprises three poems. It has to be said from the outset that they possess a rare resonance, power and depth; one that affirms this collection as an important contribution to the longstanding tradition of a spiritualised and esoteric poetry.
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Review: Autumn Richardson,‘An Almost-gone Radiance, Corbel Stone Press, 2018
There is language here
older than human thought
These words, drawn from Autumn Richardson’s recent collection, ‘An Almost-Gone Radiance’, could easily stand as an epigram to the entire work; for therein we enter an intensely immersive exploration of the contemporary landscape. Although the collection is dedicated to some of the northern hemisphere’s last surviving wildernesses; the vast forests and mountains of British Columbia, Ontario, Spain’s Sierra Nevada; at times, we may also discern echoes of Ireland’s rugged Atlantic coast and the bleak uplands of Cumbria.
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An Almost-Gone Radiance by Autumn Richardson reviewed by Peter Mark Adams