Literary Reviews

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.

Read the full review at:

https://www.paralibrum.com/reviews/animystic-by-gordon-white

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.

Read the full review at:

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.

Read the full review at:

https://www.paralibrum.com/reviews/ajar-to-the-night

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