Grimspound and Inhabiting Art

Rod Mengham’s new offering comprises two complementary halves: a poetic meditation on a place (the Bronze Age site of Grimspound on Dartmoor); and a series of short essays on different cultural habitats.

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.

Inhabiting Art gathers essays on cultural history in relation to landscape and cityscape, viewed either episodically or in the form of a palimpsest, where the present state of the habitat both reveals and conceals its own history and prehistory.

Rod Mengham’s 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).