landscapes lost, abandoned, forgotten, mythic
ECHTRAI JOURNAL, EDITION 3
A5, Perfect Bound, printed on fine papers
129 Pages, B&W Text and Images
PRICE: £12.50 + £3.50 P&P (UK & EUROPE – £5.50 USA)
PUBLICATION: September 20th 2023 – delays to original schedule.
PRE-ORDERS from 15th July 2023
SOLD OUT!
This, the third Edition of Echtrai, and fourth in the opening series, brings about the end of the first volume of this exciting and innovative journal anthology.
Containing evocative and engaging texts by a wide variety of writers and poets, with styles ranging from excellent quality prose works, to the more experimental and exploratory, Echtrai has established itself as a highly unique document dedicated to landscapes of loss, and the slow erosion of our heritage and social history
We end this series with guest contributions from Adi Newton, the mastermind behind experimental music/ media groups, Clock DVA and The Anti Group (TAGC), master poet and visual artist, Alec Finlay, Poet/ Writer, Roselle Angwin, Novelist, David Gladwin, Writer and Researcher , Bran Graeme Nairne, Writer and Academic, Nick Pepper, and excellent quality poems and prose from Pratibha Castle, Anna Evans, Alessia Crestani, Julia Usman, Julie Hamilton, Baz Nichols, Anna Quarendon, William Andrews, Barbara Hickson, Benedict Flett, Sighle Meehan, Brighid Black, Belinda Guerriero, Stella Sebellin, and David Lewis.
Front Cover Artwork by kind consent of Claire Maria Wood :
“I walk each day, in all weathers, with my dog Poppy. To be at the edge of the elements, where light shifts and dances; reliant and yet independent of the darkness, is what inspires me to paint…In the studio the language of mark making tells my story without words, communicating my innermost thoughts through touch. My work is an attempt to connect and transcend the viewer to a place beyond the realm of physical sight. Perhaps a place a nostalgia, of wonder and of memory. .”
BRIOCHT – Pratibha Castle
Women, sly as flames, sidle past the padre after Sunday mass. Ghost, on a moonless night, beyond the whitethorn hedge. Sign themselves, gliding, through the gate.
PERIMETER LINES – Anna Evans
Signs of cultivation among the wildness, and the blurring of boundaries. The edges of the lost railway are being claimed as space for city dwellers, without too much alteration or development, without infringing on its apartness too much.
ALDER AND THE DREAMTIME – Roselle Angwin
There was something about your bearing,
shy delicacy, robust resilience in the roots, that reminded me
too of her, and how many times our duo made
an Otherworld journey across the bridge of you.
MAYBE THEY’LL UNDERSTAND MY TRUE CORE – Alessia Crestani
Remember: be strong, be strong
Don’t let the wind take away the pieces of memory you’ve been keeping all these years
THE ITALIAN CHAPEL, ORKNEY – Nick Pepper
The nearby rusted, rotting hulks of the block ships, the decaying concrete of the causeways, and the delicacy of the Italian chapel murals are all connected through their vulnerability to forces of nature.
THE LOST STATION AT BROOMIELAW – Julia Usman
In loss and detritus, no crowns or jewels of chatter, no textures of tobacco, just the high shift of a buzzard’s mew, cloud-trapped on this dark afternoon of grey guzzling light. And so little bone to resist a malignant breeze as it bruises your brittle brick walls. The slow dismantling, disintegration of nobility.
THE DIGGER AND THE DOG – Julie Hamilton
Look closely. The skull is missing teeth;
the rest are polished nubs. He’s too old
to crack bones tossed from the table.
Someone fed him, maybe pre-chewed his meat.
WALKING THE WOOD ROAD NORTH, Part 2 – David Gladwin
Repossessed by nature, the canal was an early inspiration and its towpath my preferred route to the field from which I would climb the valleyside through the woods.
MEMOIR OF A HIDDEN PLACE – Stella Sebellin
I remember my helpless struggle to bring her back from the abyss as she was drowning in a mysterious world of her own.
What was she trying to grasp with her hand in the air?
Who was she talking to in fragmented, tangled words?
THE BULLERS AT BUCHAN – Bran Graeme Nairne
..beyond the purpled slopes
and misted havens
their cries like oaths, echoing amidst the slap of waves and fading daylight glow
lost atoms, blow-ins from arctic limits
HIRTA – Anna Quarendon
The wild salt air that once carried pipe smoke
tastes of loss as the wind whips through
the abandoned doorways on Main Street.
TOKYO, AN ARCHAEOLOGY – William Andrews
The embankment’s re-emergence should have been the railway equivalent of a marebito – those supernatural figures from Japanese folk whispers of generations past who come from afar with gifts and wisdom.
SEDGWICK – Barbara Hickson
The old gunpowder works
cracked concrete dull under bramble.
Revetments, head-race, weir.
Walls of incorporating mills,
clocking-in shed, sawmill, cooperage,
water-wheel housing, turbine pit.
DARTMOOR’S LOST RAINFOREST AND ITS PLANTATION OTHER – Benedict Flett
The Commission also had to contend with the Dartmoor Preservationist Association, which opposed the plantations on the basis that they compromised the Moor’s desolate beauty by blunting the profile of hills and, in the case of Bellever, on account of various antiquities – cairns, hut circles and evidence of an early field system.
STITCHING THE TWEED – Barbara Hickson
a
seam
stitching
two
elements
together
CLONMACNOISE – Sighle Meehan
I kneel among the tombstones, feel
the pulse of recitation in the fallow soil
prayers of exultation to a living God
forgiveness wavers, settles. My soul
at peace.
ICE – Brighid Black
Dark blue sky. Blue dreamings of star-like flowers, casting their enchantment over the land and over my desiring being: thoughts from the future, of becomings, self-generating from fragments, remnants and traces.
HELM – Baz Nichols
The Helm lingers in folk memory only by what it leaves behind. Its scatterings remaindered in the oral records. Time-eroded tales handed down through generations, acquiring the patina of usage. All of these elements, it transpires, combine, condense and manifest as wind-poetry, Helm-lore, something greater than the sum of its parts.
REHASH / REASSESSMENT – Belinda Guerriero
A catacomb character was mine, formed on Piranesian architectural projections, a trace of the past,
a furrow of memories.
Now, after the disuse, I allow the man who enters me, to mentally abstract himself,
walking in the dark, inside my caves.
EXTRACTS FROM THE MERSEY NOCTURNES – David Lewis
I have deep and dark dreams of the city in ruins. Too much time poring over old photographs stirs memories of travelling across the north end of the city in the 1960s, when so much was demolished and cleared; a pale owl-child in short trousers, staring out at rubble and demolition, at surviving churches and uncertain public houses. And I have a recurring dream of the city as a wrecked sailing ship, a thing of wood and ropes barely able to break the surface of an endless grey sea – a drowning, slimed, angry tangle of burned and blackened wreckage, heaving slowly through the water, huge, still dangerous.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION An examination of theoretical factors – Adi Newton
This “residua of past experiences” was also explained by Price as a form of “deferred telepathy” as the impulse was stored (in some unknown way by an unknown method) until a person could experience the anima loci or place-memory. Lethbridge’s idea
for this recording/playback was different. He rejected Price’s “psychic ether” mechanism for his own special “fields”
DECLARATION OF CARBETH: MANIFESTO FOR HUTS OF HEALING – Alec Finlay
the first dream of the ill is a hut –
the simple life, stacked firewood,
a warm stove, an understanding mattress,
blankets, a jug of cool spring water
AnMór Studio 