Neil Wenborn (Ed.) & M.E.J. Hughes (Ed.)

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Biographical note:  Neil Wenborn is a full-time author and poet. He graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge, and worked at the Bodleian Library in Oxford before pursuing a successful career in publishing. Since 1989 he has been a freelance writer and publishing consultant and has published widely both in Britain and in the United States. Recent works include biographies of Dvorak and Mendelssohn, and an e-book on Jane Austen’s Emma. He is co-editor of the highly respected Companion to British History (Collins & Brown; Columbia University Press) and A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations (Cambridge University Press). Landscape — especially the landscape of his adopted Fenland — has been a central focus of his poetry, a collection of which, Firedoors, is published by Rockingham Press.

Biographical note:  Jane Hughes is a lecturer in English and has been a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, since 1987. She has written on parody and satire and is interested in the connections between medieval and contemporary writing. She is currently writing a history of satire and editing a twelfth-century book of advice to a young man about making his way in London. One of the directors of the Magdalene Festival, she plays a key role in opening up access to many of the intellectual resources of the College and of Cambridge to a wide range of people. She edited, with John Mole and Nick Seddon, the millennium volume Figures of Speech: An Anthology of Magdalene Writers.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717156
ISBN:  9781844717156
Author:  Neil Wenborn
Title:  Contourlines
Series:  Anthologies and Gift Books
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Oct-09
Extent:  128pp
Height:  246 mm
Width:  189 mm
Thickness:  14 mm
Weight:  192 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Contourlines is a unique illustrated anthology of new writing about landscape by leading contemporary poets. An inspiring companion for all lovers of landscape and its poetry, it brings together an extraordinary variety of writers to reflect on landscapes from the hills of New South Wales to the forests of the Hudson Valley, from Chilean mountainscapes to the English urban fringe.

Main description:  Contourlines is a unique anthology of new responses to landscape by some of our leading contemporary poets.

Landscape has been a prime subject of poetry and the visual arts for millennia. The way we see the world around us has been crucially shaped by the way it has been represented in words and images. For this remarkable new book poets and visual artists have been invited to reflect on landscape in all its forms: from the hills of New South Wales to the forests of the Hudson Valley, from Chilean mountainscapes to the English urban fringe.

The result is a collection which brings together an extraordinary variety of contemporary voices, and provides a rare opportunity to explore the natural and built environment through the words and perspectives of some of the most distinctive writers working in English today. Striking visual images have been chosen to offer new angles on the poems and the landscapes with which they engage.

Commissioned by Magdalene College, Cambridge, as part of the College’s year-long Festival of Landscape, and to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the University, the book reflects those traits of innovation and tradition, reflection and intellectual engagement, humanity and enthusiasm, of which the College is proud.

In a time of climate change and environmental degradation, Contourlines is a celebration of a resource at once precious and precarious, and of the rich interdependence of the land and the histories of the peoples who inhabit it. It will be an inspiring companion for all lovers of landscape and its poetry.

Contourlines includes poems by Gillian Allnutt, Richard Berengarten, Clare Crossman, Tony Curtis, Maura Dooley, Nick Drake, Ian Duhig, Jane Duran, Elaine Feinstein, Matthew Francis, John Greening, Philip Gross, Judith Kazantzis, Joanne Limburg, Michael Longley, Rod Mengham, John Mole, Les Murray, Gregory Norminton, Ruth Padel, Ian Patterson, Pascale Petit, Jane Routh, Fiona Sampson, Neil Wenborn, Susan Wicks, Clive Wilmer and Tamar Yoseloff.

Table of contents:
Preface
Introduction
Ruth Padel
The Treasure Map
Tony Curtis
Lydstep Headland
Philip Gross
Betweenland
Tony Curtis
Two At Manorbier
Susan Wicks
Inside The Movement
Jane Routh
An Unspoken Rule About Distances
The Orchid Field
John Greening
A Huntingdonshire Elegy
Tony Curtis
Reaching Yr Achub
Neil Wenborn
Dover
Richard Berengarten
Approaching Ireland
Ian Patterson
Ideal Fingers
Michael Longley
On The Shetlands
Whalsay
Shetland Mouse-Ear
Les Murray
The Cowladder Stanzas
Gregory Norminton
Frommalaysian Journal
Pascale Petit
Yellow Mountain
Jane Duran
Morphology
The Andes
Cordillera
Judith Kazantzis
River That Flows Both Ways
The Long Man Of Wilmington
Clare Crossman
Green Man
The Walk
John Greening
The Pond
Fiona Sampson
Deep Water
Matthew Francis
Cwm Elan
Gillian Allnutt
Sibelius
Old
John Greening
Ice Age
Maura Dooley
Melancholia
Susan Wicks
Virtual
Bypass
Ian Duhig
Róisín Bán
Joanne Limburg
From The Best Western, Kansas
Maura Dooley
From A Train Window
Tamar Yoseloff
Field
Concrete
John Mole
The Transformation
Elaine Feinstein
Basel 1972
Clive Wilmer
Civitas
Rod Mengham
From Grimspound
Nick Drake
Mist
The Empire Of After
Jane Routh
Census
List Of Illustrations
List Of Contributors
Acknowledgements

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Excerpt from book:  

Introduction

One of the pleasures of editing an anthology is choosing the title. After the excitement of seeing the contributions come in, and of getting to know them as individual landmarks, it is a fresh opportunity to stand back and survey them as part of the wider landscape of the book — a chance to think anew about what connects and separates them, the divergences and (one of our shortlist of possible titles) the common ground. In inviting contributions to this anthology, we made no stipulations as to type or treatment of landscape. As a result, the differences and similarities between them — and the light they cast on landscape, and the representation of landscape, at the beginning of the twenty-first century — emerge spontaneously from the chosen perspectives of the contributors themselves. Our title, we hope, might be an invitation to explore some of those parallels and discontinuities, the shared reliefs and unexpected gradients, even the sudden openings and crevasses, we seemed to find in and between these contemporary poetic and visual landscapes.

As our subtitle says, then, this is a book of new responses to landscape in word and image. The landscapes to be found in its pages are many and various: from the hills of New South Wales to the forests of the Hudson Valley; from Chilean mountainscapes to the English urban fringe. An early surprise — one of those little shocks of illumination you feel as patterns begin to emerge — was that the type of landscape most represented in the responses we received was coastal: the island shore of Michael Longley’s Shetland lyrics, for example, or the offshore waters of Richard Berengarten’s ‘Approaching Ireland’. This is not a book about global warming or habitat loss — another surprise, perhaps, was how few of the pieces addressed such issues directly — but in a time of climate change and environmental degradation our delight in the natural world is seldom unalloyed by a sense of its fragility. And nowhere is the impermanence of landscape more deeply inscribed than in the changing coastline, that borderland where, as Susan Wicks writes, a cliff can collapse overnight ‘as if the land itself had had a stroke / and stared at us next morning lop-sided’, reminding us that we are ‘built for loss’.

But what is lost can also be remembered. From Aboriginal songlines to the reindeer-herding roads of Siberia, landscapes have, for millennia, embodied the personal and collective histories of their inhabitants. In these pages, too, landscape often serves as a kind of intimate external memory — of people, events, emotions, ways of life. For John Greening a fallen tree becomes a memorial to a friend, its logpile a ‘too brief history / of a most rare native’. For Matthew Francis the great Victorian reservoirs of Wales are ‘where they keep the nineteenth century / in a thin medium of water’; while in ‘The Orchid Field’ Jane Routh conflates emotional and environmental conservation in the haunting question: ‘what if there were an SSSI / for the long hot summers of childhood? / or an acre of set-aside for first love?’

The memorial instinct is at root the desire to preserve, to fix in art what is fluid and fleeting in nature. But we are reminded, too, how stubbornly landscape resists such fixatives, forever eluding the frames with which we try to enclose it. The poet returns to the orchid field with her camera despite knowing ‘it would be nothing on film’, just as she discards the artificial certainties of cinematic convention for the mystery of the familiar in ‘An Unspoken Rule about Distances’. Similarly, for Philip Gross the ‘floodplain pastures’ of the Severn Estuary are ‘an early silver- / nitrate plate that flicks to negative // and back, depending how you tilt it’. Landscape is a slippery customer. It is as hard to keep hold of it as it is to sustain the ‘fragile focus’ of Tony Curtis’ field glasses in ‘Lydstep Headland’.

The question of focus — of where and how those creative field glasses are trained on the landscape — informs many of the contributions here. The very idea of landscape raises the question of perspective, of the position of the viewer. We might aim for that clear-sighted perception which engages with a place without changing its character. Yet the act of looking itself shapes the landscape, which is renewed and altered by a slant of light, a sudden memory, even by the ‘expected view’, as in Maura Dooley’s ‘From a Train Window’. Ian Patterson’s elegiac account of the dawn light which ‘composes a view, derives a prospect’ invites us to see the land inflected by thought. Luke Bramwell’s images of enclosure, which themselves enclose this volume, unsettle us with similar shifts in perspective, as does Tom Moriarty’s vertiginous image of the textures of an urban car park.

And it’s not just looking. We feel the imprint of the landscape on all the senses — from the ‘ache at the back of the knee’ on a sloping beach to the ‘corrugated hum’ of a
cattle shed — and our experience leaves its
imprint on the landscape in return, or at least on our attempts to enclose it in words. Writing the landscape (another of our possible
titles) is rather like the scene in The Wrong Trousers where Gromit pursues the penguin by toy train. You lay down the track as you go. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the struggle to contain a landscape perpetually fighting back is often figured in images of route-making. For Joanne Limburg, surveying the land beyond her Kansas hotel room, roads ‘slice / the country into manageable portions’, saving the mind from a geography otherwise ‘unintelligible, edgeless’. Clare Crossman’s ‘Green Man’ ‘sends dandelions / through motorway cracks’. And the M1 in Ian Duhig’s ‘Roisin Ban’ is literally built on ‘pulped books’, ‘black seas of words that did not sell’ (a particularly ominous image for editors of anthologies).

Like so many explorations of the landscape, this one begins with a map. Ruth Padel’s ‘The Treasure Map’ bears witness to the eleven-year-old Charles Darwin’s sense of wonder at another liminal country, the landscape of the Welsh borders. Indeed, the idea of mapping is present throughout the book. ‘A place without a name’, as Tamar Yoseloff reminds us, is ‘nowhere / on the map’, and names and the naming of places — perhaps the most fundamental of human attempts to fix the landscape in words — are recurrent motifs. Thus, for Les Murray, ‘Thinking up names / for a lofty farm’ develops into a kind of ludic incantation, while for Pascale Petit the ‘ghost names’ whispered ‘against Echo Wall’ are ‘the mantra that keeps me going’. In Rod Mengham’s ‘Grimspound’ project, too, the poet’s seasonal returns to a Bronze Age settlement site on Dartmoor construct, visit by visit, a survey of a single, intensely observed landscape — a kind of map in time.

In a wider sense, however, this whole book could be described as an essay in mapmaking, a series of what Les Murray has called elsewhere ‘translations from the natural world’. These are, after all, journeys, not in woods and fields and mountains, but in words and images. The writings collected here are translations of the landscape into symbols. And what could be more like a map than that? In the end, then — to revert to our own search for a name — it was to the language of cartography that we turned for our title. We hope that Contourlines may prove a companion through more landscapes than the ones between its covers, and that you will enjoy exploring them all.

Neil Wenborn and M. E. J. Hughes
Cambridge, March 2009