Dreamland: Going To Ground - An Anthology Of Nature And Place, Edited By Jon Woolcott

The truly remarkable thing about Little Toller’s new anthology is the variegated manner of its focus. Featuring the reflections of a number of established writers, emerging from all colours of the sociocultural spectrum, the received impression is kaleidoscopic, a mingling of style with labile observation, rural with urban landscapes, as though each observer was an undirected flâneur, seduced, but not always obsessed, by themes as they pass through.

The writers are, as it were, partially immersed, with sufficient breathing space to enable a constructive detachment from their subject(s). Overview is key: whether insinuating the inner-messaging of a long cultural history’s voice into the aural receptors of the present in the manner of Graham Mort’s relationship with the Yorkshire Dales, finding a focus for multi-generational consanguinity in Meriel Harrison’s powerful description of Clevedon Pier, or Jane Hughes’ locating of the significance of a sense of belonging in the unprepossessing concrete blocks of Didcot Power Station, evaluation is rendered watertight in the poetry of the original perspective.

And for all that Going to Ground is properly dominated by the pull and push of rural landscapes – editor Jon Woolcott’s curation of The Clearing, the online journal whence the anthology emerged, has become a kind of forum for writers new to nature writing – to circumscribe its purview would be to commit an interpretative injustice in a nation of mostly urban dwellers. What Tim Dee engagingly refers to as ‘dross-scapes’, those ‘scuzzy’ mountains of human-generated rubbish that gulls pick relentlessly at, may be found, in Dee’s South African second home, in a place called Lambert’s Bay. The writer’s curiously adaptable style is fit meat for his subject; finding, like Dante, nuggets in the Malebolge, his witty deconstruction of the giant city arsehole that continues to evacuate 280kms north of Cape Town presumably to avoid shitting on its own doorstep, is convincingly symmetrical, and wholly knowable: ‘…the chances are that if we built the nest ourselves, we’ll know how to sit in it’. Our figurative ‘dirty sheets’ are ‘generative; life lives there’, including the Cape gannetry, whose cumulative presence makes a supremely ironic comment on species migration, and a tourist attraction of the vast flocks that breed in the dump.

... the towers were as mightily conspicuous and as indivisibly associated with home, rising ‘regal’ out of the flattish Thames plain, as Emley Moor mast was to me as a kid, returning over the Pennines to Huddersfield.Dee’s style, on this and other subjects, is profoundly engaging: an easeful conversational guide, his neat line in, sometimes acerbic, understatement reminds of the late Jonathan Raban, another ego subordinated to the demands of close observation. For Dee, the gauntlet running of the exiting birds lies ‘at the edge of their earthly domain, the grit and guano-trampled runway to the sky’ (‘Bird Island’). The sudden leap for freedom recalibrates the muck-heap and midden into something more conventionally hopeful, something that will continue to transcend the detritic leavings of our lives.

Jane Hughes’ paean to home is counter-intuitive in a different way – a celebration, almost, of the kind of ugliness that is ugly only to outsiders. Didcot Power Station’s blunt, Stalin-Gothic walls and cooling towers, are, in ‘We All Fall Down’, emblematic of the time in which they were optimistically conceived, during Harold Wilson’s ‘White heat of technology’ period. Hughes and her parents bought into this alluring mandate for the future and her style is accordingly engaged, infused with the collective sense of purpose that ran cheerfully alongside a ‘brighter’ tomorrow of atomic energy. The beauty the family saw, as they returned from elsewhere, was bound up with location and belonging as much as aesthetic charge: the towers were as mightily conspicuous and as indivisibly associated with home, rising ‘regal’ out of the flattish Thames plain, as Emley Moor mast was to me as a kid, returning over the Pennines to Huddersfield. It is somehow fitting to hear that Hughes’ mother, who worked at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, and was similarly imbued with the optimism of the mid-sixties, should die three weeks subsequent to the demolition of Didcot’s remaining towers – ‘At the end, it was a family, demolished’.

Others, in this judiciously curated and beautifully executed anthology, take up their search for inner peace later in life, as a reaction to personal crises, mental illness or a jaundiced perception of the world they inhabit.A crossing-over from a recalled London into a hippy-esque ‘commune’ in the purlieus of rural Oxfordshire, Nancy Campbell’s offbeat and wise perambulation - ‘Dreamland’ – is a sardonic take on the kinds of weather-worn, counter-cultural folk who choose to live on the margins. And if her episodic and anecdotal approach is planted firmly beneath the awning of a ‘broken-down 1984 Buccaneer caravan’, it remains cognizant of the metropolitan arts scene of the seventies, of nihilism, of sirens, and of the fleeting, flashing colours of the urban picaresque. The impractical idealism of Eleanor Anstruther’s early embrace of, and later disillusion with, the May festival of Beltane follows a familiar trajectory: the zip and energetic thrust of the narrative of her impressionistic innocence culminates in the end-stop of experience as the ‘May Queen’, whose obsessively ‘healthy’ diet results in the irony of her wasting away, spells the end for her, and for Anstruther’s commitment:

‘For all the tarot and runes, Goddess cards and crystals, nobody saw it coming. She died and the commune died with her.’ ('On a Surrey Hill’)

Others, in this judiciously curated and beautifully executed anthology, take up their search for inner peace later in life, as a reaction to personal crises, mental illness or a jaundiced perception of the world they inhabit. Whilst David Higgins’ eloquent and self-effacing narrative of the hidden rural detail in an otherwise unprepossessing North Leeds urban landscape remains stoically committed to the welfare of his son, in spite of the rising tide of depression overwhelming him (‘Eddie and the Birds’), Alex Diggins’ odyssey to an island of religious contemplation off R. S. Thomas’ Llŷn Peninsula becomes the template for a rich meditation on the history of monastic retreat, and the existential needfulness of seclusion. In an echoing journey of sanctity and solitude, inferred in the winds and waves of isolation, Diggins finds a fixed point in an extraneous universe of cataclysmic change; his sense of the moment’s moment is captured as lyrically as Vaughan William’s lark, as a lone bird ‘thread’s…

‘the mountainous scarps of sea, surfing the ever-shifting topography of the wind, the sun flaring chrome behind. A fellow traveller, wingtips spread out against the light, a crucifix in flight.’ (‘Holy Island’)

‘A crucifix in flight’: birds feature hugely in this collection of reminiscences, travelogues and confessionals, not least on the book’s cover, a wonderful capturing of in-flight momentum by Stephen Gill. From Tim Dee’s usurpation of bucolic convention to Chris Baker’s assiduous cataloguing of nest boxes in continuation of a tradition that anchors person to place and family history (‘My Father’s Nest Boxes’). From the negotiation of a semblance of ‘fictive’ truth amongst animated memories in the bat-thronged Kitum Cave in J.C. Niala’s Kenya (‘Imagemory’) to the sharpened and metaphorically precise bird poems of Jack Thacker, not a word is wasted. Jeremy Hughes’ closing words – ‘A bird is a poem with wings’ – give definition to Thacker’s ‘Barn Owl’:

‘In torchlight I follow

its flight path
as it traces a scythe on the night sheet
and is posted through a hole

in velvet.’

Concision; focus: the close-knit biology of the Pennine uplands of ‘Peat: The Teller of Tales’ enables Jennifer Jones to disinter history from the science that underpins it, and with a counter-intuitive stylistic brio that is repeated, to some degree by Ann Lingard, who finds a world of aeonic provenance, application and wider purpose in the shifting dunes of the Solway coast (‘Sand’). Such approaches reverse the telescope of perspective, in much the same way that Covid restrictions in Ireland encouraged Tim Hannigan to recalibrate a local view, finding, in a humble agricultural rake, an hitherto unnoticed, though much-travelled, history. Hannigan’s eloquence, vouchsafed by a pandemic, is epiphanic:

‘The right wheel is bogged in the blue shadow of the wall, but the left sits in sunlight. The eight spokes are like radial roads, running out from a solid centre to a fixed perimeter, portioning a confined vista of grass and sky.’ (‘A Circle on a Map’)

Where so many ideas, in this compendious anthology, dissolve in the protean drift of water, like Alex Woodcock’s surreal and seductive poem/homage to artist and Bexhill resident Edith Rimmington, still others peer into the waves to find a sense of familial continuity. Meriel Harrison’s fine commemoration affixes a plaque, symbolic as much as literal, to Clevedon Pier – the repository of generations of family memory – in order to reaffirm a binding union of emotional affiliation. And in another sense, Graham Mort’s poetic and profoundly affecting re-envisioning of the Yorkshire Dales performs a similar ministry for those held close in memorial harness. A psycho-geography of place and an acceptance of the fallibility of powers of recall, Mort’s journey obliges the past into the present, incorporating the hills, the old mine workings and the iconography of personal history in the rendering of a changeful continuum. His reading of the transition of life in the fixed point of landscape is eloquent:

‘We’ve changed nature for sure, or our nature is change. Tribalism, imperial force, the power of market forces, new technologies, free-trade, flexible labour markets. I see the ghostly miners of Swaledale in this future. Instead of knitting, they’re texting as they walk, their progress lit by tiny screens that glimmer in pre-dawn dusk.’ (‘Heritage’)

And in a universe of mobiles and market forces, who could gainsay Jon Woolcott’s inclusion of a long, resolutely earthy and rhythmically energetic poem from the Byker Wall Poets, a collective of (very) young writers from Newcastle who write with immense vigour about what they see, feel and hear on the streets of the city. In ‘Happy Meal’, a compound of reality and fantasy, of delicious rhyme and comic timing, we find a ‘Maccy D’s’ devoid of burgers because the local cows are resting their hooves for a well-earned rest:

‘The second stops green
Where animals roam
And pigs talk in French once the staff have gone home
The charity farm
Where cows can relax
Can put up their hooves and lie flat on their backs’.


Going to Ground: An Anthology of Nature and Place, Edited by Jon Woolcott is published by Little Toller (2024)

More information click here.