After Light at Southbank Centre

A new exhibition at the National Poetry Library celebrates 75 years since the 1951 Festival of Britain and the inauguration of the Southbank Centre.

Poetry Buildings includes one of my first books After Light, a collaboration with the photographer Paula Naughton. Paula and I met while working at The New York Center for Book Arts, and this was an early edition for the AM BRUNO project. In a previous post on this blog, I wrote that Paula’s strength as an artist lay in “an impetuous, sharp intelligence” and readers of The Library of Ice may recognise her in the person of “Claire”, who is instrumental in my decision to depart London for Greenland. “I turned my attention from optics to ice. From light to darkness…”

After Light (photograph above by Sarah Bodman) examines the variety of ways in which light moves and the art of photography: refraction, reflection, absorption, irradiance and diffraction. I responded to Paula's photographs by writing about scientific endeavour and empirical wonder: five lyric poems and five “poetic equations” finding emotional equivalents for the scientific terms. The poems are printed in the most ancient of book forms, a scroll, and the more recent technology of a slide viewer displays Paula’s photographs of an abandoned building in Ireland. It’s a pleasure to see this book brought back out from the library's rare books archive and I am grateful to Chris McCabe and Emily Wood at the National Poetry Library for the care they have taken in presenting the work.

After Light, text by Nancy Campbell

 

After Light, photograph by Paula Naughton

Endangered : the Lady's Slipper Orchid

Introducing Lady's Slipper Orchid - a new collaboration with sculptor Mark Butler.

For a new project titled Endangered, Butler has commissioned twenty-one texts on endangered species from contemporary writers and is creating a response in his own media of bronze and steel. Each of the species was chosen from the Nature Recovery Plan for the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

Lady's Slipper by Mark Butler with text by Nancy Campbell from Endangered

I have long been intrigued by orchids and the secrecy necessary to protect them in the wild. The Lady's Slipper Orchid is one of the rarest plants in the UK being found only in the Yorkshire Dales. This has led to the irony of the plant being caged in the wild or even uprooted from the wild (as in a controversial move in 1958) to preserve an idea of wildness. I was struck by parallels between conservationists' efforts to hide the plant from collectors and the deceptive art of the orchid flower itself, which has evolved to lure in pollinators. Often the art of editing a poem lies in the writer cutting a great deal, but the orchid is such a flagrant performer, that I allowed this poem its long lines and more florid expression. I had an uncanny sense that the orchid began to speak in its own voice. The final artwork includes text from my original draft, which Butler has cannily worked on using erasure, evoking the plant’s characteristic contrast of concealment and display. 

Endangered will be exhibited at several venues in 2027, and meanwhile the project can be seen on Butler's website.

Sands Film Studio Event

 

Suzannah V Evans' new book How Running Is (available from Guillemot Press) considers "the erotics of running and how it feels to live and move in a body." These experimental prose poems are charged with insight, a brilliant experiment in charting repetitive motion and energy, patience and momentum. Being more of a swimmer than a runner, I was delighted to find the first poem is titled "Running and Swimming".

I'll be reading with Suzannah V. Evans and Kate Potts to launch this wonderful book at Sands Film Studio, London on 10th September. I don't have any poems about running. Expect aquatic poems on surfing, sailing and water's influence on embodiment - from Uneasy Pieces and Navigations. 

Thunderstone

Out this summer! THUNDERSTONE is a tale of love, loss and vintage caravans.

Excited to be back on tour with this memoir of the recent lockdown, and its aftermath in a 1984 Buccaneer caravan. I’ll be at Edinburgh International Book Festival and PoliNations Festival in Scotland this August, and Books on Tyne in November. More events and bookshop signings up and down the country are listed on the events page of my website. 

Endorsements so far:

Gavin Francis says: ‘A memoir of great honesty and clarity, intimacy and subtlety, examining, among other things, illness and recovery.  It asks profound questions about the precarity of health, of art, and how to live through the storms of life with authenticity.’

Dan Richards says: ‘A courageous, compassionate, uncanny chronicle of life and loss on the fringes. Striking in its candour, brilliant in its breadth, punchy in its poetry, often very funny, Thunderstone is a unique and affecting take on road trip redemption when the wheels have fallen off.’

Helen Jukes says: ‘If this is a story of grief and illness, loneliness and heartache, one is left with the feeling that here is a writer who knows better than most of us how to live.’

 

Lulah Ellender says: ‘In this beautiful memoir Campbell traces a season of upheaval, grief and uncertainty as she makes a home in an unusual place… An uplifting, heart-filled read full of hope and love.’

Tanya Shadrick says: ‘Such a compelling account of deliberate living… Completely transporting, blending the intensely local with the wider world with such skill.’

Matthew Teller says: Compassionate and responsive, Nancy Campbell writes with insight of a life lived on the fringes. There is courage here, in the sharing of emotion and self-critique amid catastrophe, but THUNDERSTONE goes well beyond mere memoir. Nancy is a badass, a wild woman corralling experiences of poetry, humanity and the natural world to shape visions of new ways forward for us all. Her forgotten nettle-patch beyond the boundaries of civilisation becomes a resonant setting for what is a work of the richest travel literature, written from a place of deliberate isolation. You carry it with you, long after finishing.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh says: ‘An utterly beautiful, life-affirming, soul-shaking, heart-breaking wonder of a book.’

Fifty Words for Snow

After a year of voyaging through dictionaries in search of snow stories from around the world, I'm over the moon to announce my new book Fifty Words for Snow published this week by Elliott & Thompson. 

Fifty Words for Snow covers the alphabet from avalanche (French) to zud (Mongolian). It is a compendium of worldwide winter words: from American Sign Language (via a story of snowboarding at the Deaflympics) and Hawaiian (how snow comes to the aid of environmentalists protesting a giant telescope on a sacred mountain) to Tibetan (the beautiful snow lotus, which is collected for its medicinal uses) and Russian (the sastrugi which bedevil explorers in Antarctica yet help them orient their steps). I look at contemporary kunstschnee in movies such as Red Sparrow and Bladerunner 2, and discover the legends surrounding Itztlacoliuhqui, the terrifying ancient Aztec god of Frost.

Fifty Words for Snow can be ordered online through many retailers including Waterstones and Blackwells, or any independent bookshop. Please order from small businesses where possible, as these vital need support now more than ever.

 

Villa Concordia

Last week I arrived at the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany where I will be based for the next eleven months as a Literature Fellow. The Künstlerhaus hosts a number of artists, writers and composers from Germany and one other country each year, with scholarships provided by the Free State of Bavaria. You can see below the warm welcome given to the British artists and our German colleagues: a personal welcome on the steps of the beautiful 18th-century building.

I'm excited to be participating in a few cultural events in Bamberg and Munich during May: details here.

Rathbones Folio Prize

The Library of Ice has been longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019, open to all works of literature written in English and published in the UK. The Academy judges Kate Clanchy (chair), Chloe Aridjis and Owen Sheers nominated 20 books (pictured above) for the £30,000 prize, which will be announced on 20 May. Congratulations to my fellow nominees!

 I'm very grateful to the Academy, and to all my readers and reviewers for their belief in the book.

More information at https://www.rathbonesfolioprize.com

Italian edition of 'The Library of Ice'

On 30 January the Italian publishing house Bompiani released La Biblioteca del Ghiaccio, a new translation of The Library of Ice by Andrea Asioli. Italian readers will be able to make discoveries about ice not only in the polar regions but also closer to home: for example, the book recounts the role of the weather on the Italian Front during World War I (or the Winter War) and the early Italian icehouses which inspired 17th-century garden designer John Evelyn. I'm delighted to join the ranks of English-language authors published by Bompiani, including AL Kennedy, George Orwell, Ruth Rendell, Patti Smith and Evelyn Waugh. More details here.

Winter Roses

Canal Wreath by Phil Speight

This year I was commissioned to write a winter poem for The Poetry Society. I decided to take as my theme the hard graft that goes into maintaining a narrowboat during the coldest part of the year, as well as a life aboard, in particular the restoration of the traditional 'roses and castles' decorations.

The poem appears on the reverse of cards (blank inside) with a gorgeous wreath by traditional canal painter Phil Speight; sets can be purchased via The Poetry Society shop or in the Poetry Society Cafe in London - where my Canal Laureate exhibition Outlook and Inrush is on show until 2 February 2019.

I'm sharing wreath and poem here to wish all my friends and followers a productive winter and a peaceful and happy new year.

The Library of Ice: Reviews

It's one month since the publication of The Library of Ice, and I'm grateful that the book has received incredibly perceptive and positive reviews. My thanks to all the reviewers, and a special shout out to Patrick Barkham for selecting The Library of Ice as one of the Best Books of 2018 in the nature category in The Guardian. Here's a round up of reviews available online - click on the link to read in full.

• "A refreshing lack of romanticism." Gavin Francis in The Guardian
• "Campbell ... has invented a new kind of time-travel-writing. She is, unquestionably, one of our brightest stars." Horatio Clare in The Spectator
• "At the end of her wanderings, which are simply but beautifully related, Ms Campbell returns to her few belongings in storage in London. Nothing much remains; treasures have broken; all is in flux, like the heaving, disappearing icebergs she has left behind, with their fragile cargo of human remains.' Anonymous, reviewed with Christopher Pinney's The Waterless Sea in The Economist
• "An intellectual omnivore..." Barbara Kiser in Nature
• "Campbell’s book puts a personal slant on the conservation of texts and languages, on the importance of saving both centuries of human endeavor and the landscapes that inspired them." Anna Souter in Hyperallergic
• "In this journey, she has joined the dots between nations who don’t always recognise their primary interdependence." Sally Moss in ClimateCultures
• "an essential read for anyone interested in the mutable, multi-faceted qualities of ice". Dani Redd in The Island Review

The Library of Ice

The Library of Ice is published on 1 November. I'm delighted to be able to share its first review already (many thanks to Arabella Currie writing for Oxford Writers' House).

If you'd like to join me to celebrate ice and its many voices, look out for events happening around the country in November and December. 

You can purchase a copy of The Library of Ice online, or find it at your local independent bookshop.

Advance copies of 'The Library of Ice"

Book bloggers, book reviewers and journalists are invited to request their advance copies of The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate via NetGalley. Available now!

Poetry on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal

With Canal & River Trust staff and volunteers in Wigan

In July I spent a week travelling along the Leeds & Liverpool Canal - the UK's longest - by kayak, meeting people who live and work on the canal and gathering material for poems for the Canal Laureate project. Huge thanks to The Poetry Society, the Canal & River Trust, and the many individuals I met on the towpath for helping to make this journey possible, and a special shout out to CRT Writer in Residence Jasper Winn and Desmond Family Canoe Trail paddler Greg Brookes who kept me company for a day of paddling, including the passage through the mile-long Foulridge Tunnel.

You can read more about the practical aspects of the journey over at the British Canoeing blog, and a full report is coming soon at Waterlines.

With SLYNCS volunteers outside Blackburn

Borrowed Bookshelves 21

Arvon Foundation, Totleigh Barton, Devon.

Back to Nature? at Salon Berlin

I'm delighted to be returning to Germany next week to continue the summer's discussions on the theme of art in the anthropocene with an event at the Salon Berlin of the Museum Frieder Burda in partnership with the British Council. There'll be readings, a workshop, discussions with artists featured in the Back to Nature? exhibition - and pizza in the Clärchens Ballhaus. Full details and booking information on the website.

Borrowed Bookshelves 20

My paddle along the Leeds & Liverpool Canal began with a meal aboard Morning Mist, moored in Rodley, before reading a few poems between the acts of Alarum Theatre's performance of Idle Women of the Wartime Waterways. Kate Saffin, one half of Alarum Theatre, kindly let me take a picture of her bookshelf -- full of books used while researching the Idle Women's story.

Borrowed Bookshelves 19

In celebration of this month's Tour de France 

here's the single bookshelf at the Broken Spoke Bike Co-op, Oxford,

pleasant to browse while waiting for a spare tyre lever.

Borrowed Bookshelves 18

The Library at Stiftung Nantesbuch, Germany.

Two anthologies

I'm delighted to have poems in two anthologies published by The Emma Press this summer: 

Some Cannot Be Caught: The Emma Press Book of Beasts, edited by Anja Konig and Liane Strauss and illustrated by Emma Wright (available here)

and In Transit: Poems of Travel, edited by Sarah Jackson and Tim Youngs (available here).

The Library of Ice - new publication

I'm delighted to announce that The Library of Ice, a memoir of my seven-year adventure in search of the world's disappearing ice, will be published this autumn by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster - and copies are now available to pre-order. Thank you to everyone who has accompanied me on these journeys, both in the Arctic and back home, especially those who assisted with my research over the last year. If you'd like to be kept informed about the launch event in November 2018, please email me: nancy@nancycampbell.co.uk