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Grimspound and Inhabiting Art

Rod Mengham

Cover of Grimspound and Inhabiting Art by Rod Mengham
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Categories: 21st Century, Art, British
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (256 pages)
(Pub. Nov 2018)
9781784105907
£16.99 £15.29
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Nov 2018)
9781784105914
£13.59 £12.23
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • Rod Mengham’s new offering comprises two complementary halves: a poetic meditation on a place (the Bronze Age site of Grimspound on Dartmoor); and a series of short essays on different cultural habitats.

    Grimspound
    is a four-part work combining prose and verse, composed on site over the course of ten years. It combines a ‘wild analysis’ of Hound of the Baskervilles (whose climactic scene takes place at Grimspound), a portrait of the Victorian excavator Sabine Baring-Gould, and a series of poems that draw on the Russian linguist Aharon Dolgopolsky’s experimental Nostratic Dictionary.

    Inhabiting Art gathers essays on cultural history in relation to landscape and cityscape, viewed either episodically or in the form of a palimpsest, where the present state of the habitat both reveals and conceals its own history and prehistory.
    Rod Mengham is the author of several poetry publications, including Unsung (Salt, 2006), Chance of a Storm (Carcanet, 2015), Grimspound & Inhabiting Art ( Carcanet, 2018), 2019 the vase in pieces (Oystercatcher) and of translations Speedometry [poems by Andrzej Sosnowski] (Contraband, 2014) and Flatsharing [poems by Anne Portugal] (Equipage, 2021). He ... read more
    'He is particularly adept at discovering one place in another: finding Albania in Uxbridge... mapping ancient walkways of southern England onto the Australian Bush, or viewing Polish Constructivism in Cambridge... Inhabiting Art makes for an out-of-the-way tour in the company of a guide who is unusually scrupulous, keen-sighted and alive to the less routinely observed.' 

    William Wooten, TLS


    'We make a world and in turn it makes us. Mengham's understanding of history as a living, evolving, ever present material template onto which experience can be inscribed and evaluated makes this collection of essays and his evocation of Grimspound so special.'
    Antony Gormley
    'Mengham is an extraordinary flâneur. The astonishing detail he collates as he wanders confers Art and artfulness in the ordinary.... A fluid and convincing conduit to recognition as much as to understanding, his sentences are a joy to relish'
    Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times
    Praise for Rod Mengham 'Lucid, percipient essays... Despite its limpid style, Mengham's writing is not always easy - but nor are the ramifications of the works he is engaging with. Most of the essays are only a few pages long, but within a compressed space, he plumbs vertiginous depths of meaning.'

    James Cahill, Times Literary Supplement

    'Some of the worst contemporary art criticism hides behind a nebulous idea of poetic sensibility. One of the many reasons that Rod Mengham is such a compelling writer on art is the clarity of thought and the fine-tuned nature of his sensibilities as both poet and critic. I've never read a dull sentence of his and I've always wanted to read whatever he has to say about artists - from those I admire deeply to those about whom I know little or nothing. He's amongst the very best (and equally one of the most under-rated) writers on art of his generation.'

    Tim Marlow

    'What's moving about Chance of a Storm is the way the title probes into each poem and each poem illuminates the title, across a very  wide landscape of despair and hope. What chance is there of a storm when we see only what we see? These poems exist to create that chance, and the hope of cracking complacency open. They have an angry but generous ear for past echoes, and the sound of them being sealed airtight in the moments we're living.'
    Timothy Mathews, Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, University College London
    'These careful and intriguing poems will require turning over and over before they give up their secrets.'
    David Wheatley, TLS
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