Description: The Pale Ladder collects the majority of Richard Skelton's poetic writing published between 2009 and 2014. It includes excerpts from Landings, Moor Glisk and Limnology as well as many of his long-out-of-print Corbel Stone Press pamphlets and editions.
Brief description: Richard Skelton is an artist, musician and writer from Lancashire in northern England. His work is informed by landscape, evolving from sustained immersion in specific environments and deep, wide-ranging research incorporating toponymy and language, ecology and geology, folklore and myth. Between 2005 and 2011, he ran his own acclaimed Sustain-Release Private Press, publishing music under such names as A Broken Consort, Clouwbeck and Heidika. He currently runs Corbel Stone Press with his wife, the Canadian poet, Autumn Richardson.
Review Quotes:
"Cumbria has been a prime locale for English verse since the Lake Poets immortalized it in the early nineteenth century. Skelton's haunted and evocative poetic writings, ethereal yet oddly material, both continue and dissolve this tradition - a poetry of animal and mineral traces or residues that stir the topographical imagination."
(Paul Sheehan)
"An extraordinarily rich collection, and one that reveals Skelton to be a major voice in landscape writing."
(Alice Tarbuck)
"Litanies spoken against loss."
(Robert Macfarlane)