An Almost-Gone Radiance by Autumn Richardson

Corbel Stone Press, 2018. 82 pages.

by Peter Mark Adams

There is language here

older than human thought

These words, drawn from Autumn Richardson’s recent collection, ‘An Almost-Gone
Radiance’, could easily stand as an epigram to the entire work; for therein we enter an
intensely immersive exploration of the contemporary landscape. Although the collection is
dedicated to some of the northern hemisphere’s last surviving wildernesses; the vast forests
and mountains of British Columbia, Ontario, Spain’s Sierra Nevada; at times, we may also
discern echoes of Ireland’s rugged Atlantic coast and the bleak uplands of Cumbria.

That said, the overall feel is less that of any specific location, but rather of an encounter with
‘wildernesses’; moreover, at times the ‘action’ takes place on such a viscerally organic, and
even geo-psychic, level that we might just as well speak of the micro-landscapes and sub-
surface terrains of the poetic imagination.

The collection engages the reader in an extended meditation upon the psychological impact
of prolonged immersion in these wildernesses, sojourns made all the more intense for being
undertaken during the bleak winter months. The poet’s aim, to shed the many layers of
enculturation that provide structure and meaning in social life, is undertaken in order to
develop a deeper communion with the natural world,

All that I thought had meaning

I’ve unpacked and left by the river.

The outcome, a troubling deconstruction of the persona, facilitates a sustained and beautifully
rendered meditation on the transitory nature of forms and their inevitable transmutations,

Pines are shifting

Into crows, the wolf
Is a deer’s viscera.
Processes wherein the poet foresees her own inevitable participation,

Soon my salts will feed

The next short, sharp life.

The four movements that structure the work are not calibrated to celebrate the merely
picturesque; but rather, to confront us with nature in the raw, with primal realities,

There is no compassion here, except

that which I carry for small things

Yet still I throw lines into water

to lure what may feed me

The text exudes that existential doubt and uncertainty that inevitably attends any lone
encounter with remote and wild places wherein the exaltation of place, its unrestrained
freedom, mixes uneasily with an, at times, overwhelming sense of vulnerability and the
wariness that it gives rise to,

We must be cautious, for here

we are the same: configurations
of warm blood, and thick with scent.

Nature in the large challenges and exposes the irredeemable porosity of the persona, bound
only by the persistence of memories, imaged here as a haunting, fateful presence,

She is a dark bird trailing

Over my left shoulder

The poet, in opening and exploring this solitary path, ponders the possibilities inherent in an
almost shamanic dismembering of her own selfhood,

If I emptied myself enough, could I hear

 the root-worlds beneath me, imagine the chrysalid’s
inhabitant, its alchemical crossing?

Permitting herself to imaginatively sink into nature’s subcutaneous layers creates a mode of
ingress into yet deeper strata of experience and understanding,

Through blood-warm
grasses I sink

past rhizomes and mycelia

into the low cellars of earth

In the furthermost depths of this nykia-like descent, the persona is finally experienced as
having been consumed,

In a pupa of yellow coals

I sacrifice my old lives, old coats.

Become a smoked offering.

The inscape of the poet’s rumination affords her an almost liminal presence, positioned, as it
were, betwixt and between; straddling different orders of reality she has earned the right to
convey the voices that lay claim to her attention,

The dead draw to my fire.

I need its warmth. They need to seed
flesh with words.

And yet, this necromantic rite, its apophatic vision, the via negativa that is charted for us,
proffers no redemption nor any epiphany; rather, it simply accords the honour and respect
arising from the heartfelt remembrance due to those long sacrificed selves, the teeming lives
that these wildernesses once supported,

where hooves once pounded

and sparked in their millions.
 Now it is quiet.

This almost animistic absorption in her surroundings facilitates the mediumistic reception of
its many diverse voices; the ancestral dead, the displaced and the dispossessed, whether
hunted, culled or simply deprived of the means of survival. The lament of the many disparate
manifestations of sentience haunts the landscape,

Here I have learned what loss is

what recovers, what never recovers

and how a revenant host of trees

will hover for centuries beyond
their felling.

Reminiscent of those tribal rites enacted to repair a breach in the relationship between a
people and its natural environment and wildlife, even when that breach occurred in the
ancestral past; this fine collection manifests the will to listen, to understand and acknowledge
ancient wrongdoing. In doing so, this contribution to the literature of landscape captures a
very contemporary malaise; the ‘almost-gone radiance’ of its title and final section
acknowledges the imminent, and by now unavoidable, ecological disaster hanging over us all.
The collection draws its strength from the repetition and reiteration of its major themes, the
warp and weft of words woven carefully together to create a richly textured and immersive
experience. This work will continue to reward the attentive reader and provide a powerful
source of reflection for a long time to come.