Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Paul Kingsnorth: The Poetry of the Future Landscape


British writer Paul Kingsnorth is best known for two novels, Beast and The Wake, and a collection of essays, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. I’ve read and enjoyed Beast; it is a novel of frequent run-on sentences and no quotation marks, about a man living alone in a landscape devoid of people but with people’s artifacts remaining. I’ve started The Wakethree times, this novel of an Anglo-Saxon landowner seeking revenge on Norman invaders. It’s partially written in Kingsnorth’s version of Old English; it also lacks quotation marks and capital letters. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014, and I’m determined to make a fourth attempt to read it.

This unconventional form for his novels is of a piece with Kingsnorth’s environmental philosophy, articulated in a statement called The Dark Mountain Manifesto written with Dougald Hine in 2009. The manifesto serves as a kind of constitution for the Dark Mountain Project, self-described as “an international network of writers and artists searching for new stories for an age of upheaval.” It is a dark mountain for a dark view of what the future holds, coupled with what that future will require if individuals are to survive.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

No comments:

Post a Comment