Book Review – July 2024

This new space encompassed not only the rural, but also the urban, suburban, the in-between places, the industrial or post-industrial, the abandoned, and the places that humans were coming to live in for the first time.

Just over ten years ago the Dorset-based publisher, Little Toller, set up an online journal of new writing about landscape. The Clearing offered a space for new and extablished writers to explore themes and ideas about landscape and place. This collection, edited by Jon Woolcott, the author of Real Dorset, brings together poetry and prose by thirty writers who have contributed to The Clearing over the years, as well as a sympathetically considered introduction by Woolcott.

Being an anthology of the works of many writers, it is perhaps not surprising that there are great variations in the style and tone of the works presented in Going to Ground.  But, reading the collection as a whole, one is struck by an underlying darkness of tone; an unspoken feeling of sorrow and regret that pervades much of the writing. The threat of human-driven climate change and the extinction of species underlies many of the works in this collection. Little wonder that the word ‘Anthropocene’ crops up again and again.

In Jennifer Jones’s Peat: The Teller of Tales the story lies, quite literally, in the land beneath our feet. She focuses on what can be discerned within core samples taken from the ground in a Pennine peat bog. Layer upon layer, the successive waves of changing climate and vegetation and, more recently, the influence of humans, all contained within a half metre core of peat. Nic Wilson, in Motherlode, writes about John Clare, his connections with her own family history and the continuing relevance of his work. Amina Khan invokes the power of Byron’s words and, in A Wild Tree Toward the North, highlights the connections and exchange of ideas between Islam and the Romantics.

Going to Ground evokes a haunted land, a countryside stalked by ghosts. A layering of lives and their stories, mulched into the very soil. In White Horses, Kiwi, Trench Susannah Walker tells the story of the hillside chalk carvings of the West Country. In a more personal work, Graham Mort writes in Heritage about about how the landscape of North Yorkshire summons up visceral memories of his family and childhood.

Several of the writers in this anthology paint a picture of a nation whose countryside and edgelands have been hollowed-out by the hammer blows of neglect and greed. Our farms have become industrial units, whole species of flora and fauna face terminal decline and our rivers and streams are being steadily poisoned. But there is hope: Kathleen Jamie bids us to stop and listen. Her Lissen Everything Back proposes silently paying attention as an act of ‘resistance and renewal’ against the forces of destruction.

There are of course variations in the quality of the writing in this collection, but that’s all part of the enjoyment of such a project. Put this anthology in front of, say, the dozen members of a book group and one would most likely hear back arguments for twelve different favourite and least favourite pieces.

Jon Woolcott

Jon Woolcott is a writer and publisher and currently works for the  independent publisher, Little Toller, where he also edits The Clearing, the online journal for new writing about place and nature. He is the author of Real Dorset.

Going to Ground: An Anthology of Nature and Place

Jon Woolcott (Ed.)

Little Toller

May 2024

UK – £16.00 (paperback)

Contributors:

Louisa Adjoa Parker, Eleanor Anstruther, Chris Baker, David Hinchliffe Bradford, The Byker Wall Poets & Lee Mattinson, Nancy Campbell, Tim Dee, Alex Diggins, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Raine Geoghegan,Tim Hannigan, Meriel Harrison, David Higgins, Jane Hughes, Jeremy Hughes, Kathleen Jamie, Jennifer Jones, Amina Khan, Ann Lingard, Mary Malyon, Martin Maudsley, Graham Mort, JC Niala, Baz Nichols, Christina Riley, Jack Thacker, Susannah Walker, Elspeth Wilson, Nic Wilson, Alex Woodcock.