Richard Skelton

Hinterland is a quarterly magazine showcasing the best in creative non-fiction writing. Each issue features a stellar line-up of writing talent from around the globe: stories by established, best-selling authors as well as a host of exciting new writers making their publishing debut. Much of the writing in our latest issue relates to the body. Whether it’s addiction, illness or a coming-of-age awareness of desire, the authors featured explore how bodies can be afflicted and affected in many different ways. And in light of the recent Covid pandemic, reflections around life and mortality are inevitable, from parental time-travel through a child’s life by Jarred McGinnis (The Coward), to grief as experienced via our online lives by Joe Moran (If You Should Fail, First You Write a Sentence).Also featuring writing by Munizha Ahmad-Cooke, Laura Dobson, Edvige Giunta, Candice Kelsey, Elizabeth Norton, Ali Seegar, Richard Skelton, Michelle Spinei, Adrian Tissier, Dave Wakely and Sam Gordon Webb.

Stranger in the Mask of a Deer conjures an elemental, dreamlike narrative ranging from the present to the Late-Upper Palaeolithic, when the British peninsula was gradually reoccupied by humans and animals returning from the greater continent after the Ice Age. Richard Skelton began this book-length poem many years ago with the intention of exploring the history of Britain's landscape, only for the text to transform into a kind of literary seance, involving both human and other-than-human voices. Its transforming power lies in the accumulative magic of the word as ritual. Skelton's is a mesmeric lyric, probing the edges of consciousness towards a place where 'there are always presences / always inherences / things beyond sight.' 'An incredibly moving, essential meditation on where we have come from, where we are, and where we are headed.' -Kerri ni Dochartaigh

Limnology was originally published in 2012 by Corbel Stone Press, and comprised a sequence of poems variously structured to echo the serpentine progress of streams, rivers and other inland waterways. The source of much of this work was a glossary of riverine words that constituted the book's final section. The poems 'before the river, 'rising', 'after the thaw' and 'from the desert waste' were drawings from this 'great river'; offshoots and diversions from a larger body of water. These poems were originally intermingled with a series of text rivers that further imitated the natural motions of water and gravity. Letters cascaded down the page, overlapping, merging and gathering, forming pools and streams. These visual poems took as their source the poem 'line' from Skelton's earlier book, Landings What line did the river first write in the valley?What sense, made over and over, now senseless? This river writing was therefore virtually illegible-its meaning arose from its enactment of physical processes. In so doing, the open book became a v-shaped valley, and the page and embodiment of a particular landscape. In this new edition, these visual poems have been extensively rewritten-their forms liberated from the rule of traditional typographic lineation. The result is a series of texts that more faithfully enact the sinuous meandering of becks, rills and ghylls, or the patterning of river deltas. Added to the original Limnology in this new volume are a series of further works, created between 2013 and 2020. These include Become a Ford (2013), Still Glides the Stream (2014) and Erosions (2020)-the latter a series of weathered found poems; texts that document their own gradual disintegration.

'Are these the bone communities'A Flint Incentive collects the majority of Richard Skelton's writing since 2015-over one hundred and forty texts from numerous small press pamphlets, poem cards, books and editions. Works include Ferae Naturae (2015), The Not Fire (2015), On Ruin (2018), Chemical Memories (2019), Moraine (2020) and Notes on the Landscape, II (2020).A significant portion of the book comprises an overview of The Cult Revived, an ongoing literary archaeology of archival sources begun in 2015. At its core, the work contends that echoes of archaic oral cultures can be found in the textual residues of the present. It therefore amasses a 'word moraine' by randomly intermingling elements from a range of subjects, including archaeology, ecology, geology, toponymy, mythology, religion and folklore. This material then becomes the site for a series of poetic excavations.The book also contains Skelton's long poem, Dark Hollow Dark (2019)-a 'chant in seven parts' that absorbs textual spolia from various archaic sources to explore other-than-human voices. In addition to his poetry, A Flint Incentive contains excerpts from his two works of fiction, The Look Away (2018) and And Then Gone (2020). The collection is completed by a new sequence of twenty-five poems, entitled The Second Chamber, written during the late summer, autumn and early winter of 2019.

Landings is a deeply personal and unique response to the moorland landscape of Anglezarke in northern England. Written over the course of half a decade, the book is assembled from a diverse sources: texts excised from the author's own notebooks and diaries are combined with excerpts from census and parish records, maps and historical treatises.

Between 2010 and 2015, Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton produced a series of collaborative artworks, publications and editions about the upland landscapes of south-western Cumbria, in northern England. Key to their work has been the development of the list-poem, which, at its most fundamental, magnifies the act of attention and the facility of language - through naming - to refer to things, places, to life itself. The texts they assemble frequently contain material drawn from a variety of sources: pollen diagrams, dialect glossaries, cartographic records, archaeological tracts - but their repurposing of this material as art is deeply humane, aimed at drawing the attention towards the lost, forgotten or overlooked. It celebrates the poetry and beauty that such attention can reveal, and gently urges each of us towards a more intimate relationship with our natural surroundings.In January of 2015, the Cumbrian charity Lakeland Arts staged an exhibition of their work at Abbot Hall and Blackwell. The show incorporated printed matter, artefacts, assemblages, music and film from the previous five years, along with new works, including a wolf skeleton focal piece, generously loaned from Kendal Museum.Memorious Earth collects the artists' Cumbrian work between 2010 and 2015, incorporating all their previously published (and now out-of-print) text works with an introductory overview written by the artists themselves. First published by their own Corbel Stone Press in 2015, this new Xylem Books edition includes two subsequently commissioned pieces, Thwaite and Furness Fells, as well as a gazetteer of place-names from the south-western uplands. Memorious Earth is a vital document of what must surely constitute one of the most significant small-press collaborations of recent years.

The Pale Ladder collects the majority of Richard Skelton's poetic writing since 2005, including work first published in 2009 through his own Sustain-Release Private Press, and selections from the Corbel Stone Press catalogue, including writing co-authored with Autumn Richardson - an endeavour which must surely constitute one of the most significant and sustained small press collaborations of recent years.Over one hundred poems and texts are reprinted in The Pale Ladder, including work from many long out-of-print and limited edition titles. In gathering these various works together for the first time, it is possible to glimpse the artist's overarching themes - the interconnecting threads - and to plot their development. Key among them is the desire to observe, to bear witness and to record the testimony of the land itself, through its many and varied agencies - its topography and weather, its flora and fauna, its place-names and dialects, and its records and archives.Martyn Hudson describes this as "a sustained reflection on the nature of land and biography" - an "idiosyncratic archiving of local topographies and the secrets they hold." Crucially, he identifies Skelton's focus on the "borders between the human and the non-human, and between actuality and imagination," and it is this attention to what lies beyond material reality that characterises much of Skelton's work - his willingness to give voice to the countless others; the land's heretical and supernatural voices.

Field Notes is an ongoing series of works by Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton, each aiming to enshrine an aspect of a particular place within a single poem or small collection. Volume One collects poetry written between 2009 and 2011, from areas across England, Scotland and Ireland, including the Burren (County Clare), St Helen's Wood (East Sussex), Tentsmuir (Fife), Ulpha Fell (Cumbria), and the West Pennine Moors (Lancashire). Over the course of its pages, Field Notes immerses the reader in each environment, revealing something of what is unique to each place, whilst also hinting at the underlying connections that exist between them.

Richard Skelton spent nearly half a decade living in a small valley high in the Furness hills of Cumbria, in northern England. When not writing or composing music, most of his days were spent beating the valley's bounds, exploring its network of paths, streams and walls. Beyond the Fell Wall is a distillation of his observations and thoughts about this particular patch of land. It is a poetic enquiry into the life of an seemingly inanimate landscape - its otherwise unheard melodies and unseen movements. It considers both vast geological epochs and brief moments of intimacy, and in turn it asks us to consider sentience in all things, whether animal, vegetable or mineral. At the heart of the book is the fell wall itself: vast and serpentine - a vessel for the lives, voices and myths of the landscape.

If you're red-blooded and somewhere between 35 and 50 the chances are that your first bike was a sports moped. This book takes you on a nostalgic full throttle trip back to the heady days of the 1970s and early 80s when these fabulous little superbikes were available to 16-year-olds. Packed with photos from past and present, this book will revive wonderful memories of the machines, the people, the fashions, and even the music of the time. Includes coverage of AJW, Batavus, Casal, Cimatti, Derbi, Fantic, Flandria, Garelli, Gilera, Gitane, Honda, Kreidler, KTM, Malaguti, Motobecane, Negrini, NVT, Puch, Suzuki, Testi, Yamaha and Zundapp.

Born in Shropshire soon after the end of the First World War, venerable motoring writer W de Forte has driven everything from his grandfather's first Daimler, to modern-day supercars … ridden everything from vertiginous Victorian penny farthings, to high velocity twenty-first century superbikes … travelled everywhere from the permafrost of the Arctic Circle to the baking sands of the Baja Peninsula … and met everyone from Tazio Nuvolari to Valentino Rossi. W de Forte enjoyed an eventful career as a top-level journalist, spanning 75 years, during which time he tested many thousands of cars and reported on countless automotive events around the world. This made him uniquely qualified to comment on all aspects of classic and vintage motoring and motorcycling. Relatively undimmed by age and ague, even in his 90s, de Forte had no plans to retire, but, in early 2011, a high-speed prang while testing a wayward Rudge Ulster at a racing circuit in Belgium brought him up with a jolt, both literally and metaphorically. After recuperating in hospital, he settled down to write his long-awaited and much requested autobiography. This unique and insightful book is the result. Packed with fascinating stories about classic cars and motorcycles, A Life Awheel – the ‘Auto’ Biography of W de Forte is an account of an extraordinary motoring life, and the story of motoring in the 20th century.