Corbel Stone Press
10th Anniversary Event
Over the past ten years Corbel Stone Press has become one of the foremost small presses dedicated to landscape and the natural world. In addition to their own groundbreaking individual and collaborative work, they have provided a vital space for emerging and established writers to address the issue of what it means to share the world with other forms of life. In the pages of their journal Reliquiae you will find work by many vital voices in contemporary ecoliterature, from Kerri ní Dochartaigh to Robert Macfarlane, Don Domanski to Penelope Shuttle.
Introduction by Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton
Corbel Stone Press began life in late 2009 with the publication of Typography of the Shore, a collaborative micro-collection of poetry written as a sequence of ‘field notes’ in response to a specific locality. Over the next few years we produced a series of similar, limited-edition pamphlets, focused on the flora and fauna of unique environments, before gathering them into our first book, Field Notes (2012). The main impetus behind this work was to amplify acts of attention; to ‘enshrine an aspect of a particular place within a single poem or small collection’.
When we began Corbel Stone Press, it was always our intention to publish the work of others in addition to our own — to gather both old and new writing that focuses on landscape, nature and mythology. In 2013 the first volume of Reliquiae was published — a transtemporal, multicultural journal that seeks to celebrate the variety and importance of other-than-human life. It has been an honour to publish contemporary writing from the Yucatán alongside ancient Southern African folklore; to feature modern interpretations of Old Norse charm poems alongside ancient Greek natural philosophy; to showcase Canadian animist poems alongside ancient Sumerian inscriptions. Over the past seven years we’ve featured nearly two hundred writers and translators, old and new, from across the world in what we hope is a vital and necessary contribution to the fields of ecoliterature and mythological studies.
In selecting writers for this tenth anniversary celebration, we’ve looked closer to home — reflecting Aerial’s concern with supporting the work of artists local to the North West. We’ve published both Erica Bell and Andy Hopkins in Reliquiae, and their poetry reflects not only the depth of talent in Cumbria, but a deep and abiding engagement with the natural world. Gerry Loose is from a little further afield, just up the coast on the isle of Bute. We first featured his work in Reliquiae in 2015, and published his evocative collection of ogham translations, The Great Book of the Wood, in 2020. The work of Penelope Shuttle represents a fertile channel running south-west down to the Cornish coast — she’s become a regular contributor to Reliquiae since 2016. Helena Hunter & Mark Peter Wright have been long-term friends of the press — we published Mark’s Tasked to Hear in 2014, and Helena in Alterity in 2019. Lastly, to add a little international flavour, Peter O’Leary is from Illinois, USA. We first contacted him in 2014 in his capacity as executor of Ronald Johnson’s work. He graciously allowed us to republish an excerpt from the seminal British landscape poem, The Book of the Green Man. As a consequence, we discovered his incredible translations from the Finnish Kalevala, and featured an excerpt in the same volume of Reliquiae. We’ve published his vivid, incantatory poetry in the journal many times since then. It’s been a joy to invite each of these poets and artists to make a short film in celebration of ten years of Corbel Stone Press. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.
Autumn and Richard