The Alchemical Landscape: Rod Mengham and Grimspound

Tue 14 May 2019

Seminar Room SG2

Please join us as we welcome Rod Mengham who will be reading from and
discussing his new work Grimspound (2018).

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.

Grimspound was published in 2018 by Carcanet in a volume featuring
Inhabiting Art, a set of essays on cultural history in relation to
landscape and cityscape.

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784105907


'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.


Rod Mengham is Reader in English Literature at the University of Cambridge.
His published poetry includes Chance of a Storm (Carcanet, 2015), Unsung:
New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2001), Parley and Skirmishes (Ars Cameralis,
2007) and with Marc Atkins a book of texts and film stills, Still Moving
(Veer, 2014). He has published monographs and edited collections of essays
on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, violence and avant-garde art,
the 1940s, and contemporary poetry. He has co-edited the anthologies
Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (2003) and Vanishing Points: New
Modernist Poems (2005). His translations include Andrzej Sosnowski's
Speedometry (Contraband, 2014).

Cost: Free