PUBLISHED TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m pleased to say my new book is available. Holme Fell: a sample of landscapes, a collaboration with the photographer Trev Eales, is the most sumptuous and well-designed book of which I have been a part. Hats off to Alec Newman of Knives Forks and Spoons Press for his design and publishing skills. And to Trev for his photographs, of course. It consists of many colour photographs and texts, beautifully presented to enhance the double reading and viewing experience. The images and texts exist in a loose symbiosis, with parallel truths and connecting paths between them.
Ian McMillan on Bluesky praised the book: ‘So good to experience this meeting of poetry and photography by @robertsheppard.bsky.social and Trev Eales from the always exciting Knives Forks and Spoons Press. “A crackle of purple twiglets/against ice-blue mountains, blue clouds:”’
I’ve found that everyone who has seen the book is deeply impressed, and I’ve sold a number already, particularly on the basis of the full-page colour photographs, and the ‘feel’ of the book in their hands. It’s not quite a coffee-table book so you won’t have to buy a coffee-table to go under it, but it ‘looks superb’. Details here:
Let’s
a say a little more about the book as a whole. Holme Fell is a ‘sample
of landscapes’ in two senses. Firstly, as a series of photographs of Holme
Fell, with a focus on Hodge Close, the old slate quarry, at its centre. The
images present the sublimity of the landscape in spectacular weather, but
remind us that beauty and post-industrial sites are not mutually exclusive.
Secondly, as a sequence of poetry and prose that reacts to the photographs
themselves, and through which are also woven some historical accounts of
quarrying along with the prose narrative of a contemporary architect escaping
her responsibilities but questioning the nature of things as she encounters
them. ‘Hodge Close’ poems operate as an inner section of ‘Holme Fell’,
landscape within a landscape, a poem within the poem.
You know who I am, but who is Trev Eales? He lives in south Cumbria, and location has long fed his passion for landscape photography. During autumn and winter, if the weather is ‘interesting’, he is often found wandering the Lakeland fells hoping that the changing light and colours will present a photographic opportunity. He is also a music photographer (and reviewer) who has shot for various festivals and other events, largely in the summer. I have known Trev for over half a century: we were students together at university in Norwich.
I have been posting on this blog some of the images and texts, though they don’t give an impression of the integrated book design. However, I do read some of the poems on video, and one of the posts contains an account of a journey to Holme Fell that is not in the book itself. They begin here: Pages: Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard HOLME FELL: a Sample of Landscapes Number One, with links to the rest, six in all.
