A Downland Index
Angus Carlyle
A hundred successive slow
runs on the chalk downs above Brighton, each written up in a hundred words.
ISBN 978 1 910010 10 5
72pp, 234 x 142
paperback with flaps
2016, £9.00
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Reviews and articles
“Whilst dozens of books are published every year about walking, no-one ever writes about how it feels to experience the British landscape by running through it. Which is all a very long-winded way of saying how delighted I was to read Angus Carlyle’s A Downland Index… Reading it felt like I was holding up a mirror to my own experience.”
Mathew Clayton, Caught by the River
“Running may prevent deep engagement with a particular place but it nevertheless allows for reflection on something glimpsed back along the path. The resulting texts, like Imagist poems, focus on particular moments and leave the reader to imagine the rest.”
Andrew Ray, Some Landscapes
“Each piece is satisfying complete in itself, but the hundred together are mesmeric. Full of delights, often deeply poetic, they’re a wonderful celebration of the particular.”
Museum of Thin Objects
“Much of what felt central to this project was captured in its working title, ‘A Slow Runner’—the sense of self-deprecation, the unhurried pace, a literal accounting for physical action. And yet this provisional title, with its emphasis on diarising the moving, breathing body as it runs, eclipsed the significance of the South Downs themselves, location for the eighteen-month exploration of ridges, slopes and clefts, clouds condensing above, winds as force and breath, sun and rain, dawns, dusks and nights that fall, streets and bridges, roads and traffic, cows, bulls, squirrels, bees and birds, crowds outside pubs, walkers, anglers.
‘A Downland Index’ now, then, to better balance the body to its setting, but also to describe the processes of both remembering and writing that generate the hundred narrative texts forming the body of this book, as well as the index that precedes them.”
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Angus Carlyle is Professor of Sound and Landscape at the University of the Arts London. Over the past thirty years he has been an intermittent contributor to zines and magazines, exhibition catalogues and artist monographs, academic books and journals.
Since 2007, he has made writing as supplement to the processes of listening, recording and remembering that inform such art works as:
51° 32’ 6.954” N / 0° 00’ 47.0808” W (2008)
Some Memories of Bamboo (2009)
Air Pressure (2012)
In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain (2016)
www.anguscarlyle.com