‘betwixt and between’: Radical Movements in and of the Culverted Adda

Kemp, Sam (2023) ‘betwixt and between’: Radical Movements in and of the Culverted Adda. In: The poetry of Zoe Skoulding. Palgrave Macmillan. (In Press)

Abstract

Radical Landscape Poetry exists ‘betwixt and between’ the well-known British poetic traditions of the pastoral and ecopoetry, and, as Harriet Tarlo (2011) writes, the relatively newly-defined genre is characterized by ‘a poetry full of questions, uncertainties, self doubt and self-correction’ (12). Skoulding enacts this mission in her walking and writing of the culverted path of the river Adda in North Wales. Her sequence Adda engages with the uncertainty of place and language and the role of movement, both bodily, geographical and linguistic, in exploring the river’s legacy and future as it winds its way through the Welsh rural, urban and commercial landscape. Similarly, her sequence HEFT, which follows Adda in Footnotes to Water (2019), poses questions of language and rural/urban radicality. This essay examines the ways in which Skoulding enacts and expands on the tropes of ‘radical landscape poetry’ and, using Tarlo’s anthology Ground Aslant, which popularized the term, I will explore how Adda and HEFT unsettle British rural writing traditions while also paying homage to the pastoral temptations of landscape writing. This balance is negotiated using a ‘radical’ ever-shifting sense of place, both in terms of form and imagery. Skoulding, Z., Footnotes to Water (Bridgend: Seren, 2019) Tarlo, H., (ed.) The Ground Aslant (Exeter: Shearsman, 2011)

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