Grimspound and Inhabiting Art

Mengham Rod

Rod Mengham's new offering comprises two complementary halves, one is a poetic meditation on a place (the Bronze Age site of Grimspound, on Dartmoor) and the other is 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.

About the Author

Rod Mengham lives and works in Cambridge. He has written books on Henry Green, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and on language and cultural history. He is co-editor of Altered State: the New Polish Poetry (Arc, 2003) and, with John Kinsella, of Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (Salt, 2004); also editor of the Equipage series of poetry pamphlets. His own poetry publications have included Unsung: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2001) and, with photographs by Marc Atkins, Still Moving Veer, 2014).

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