We’re back, moored up, at the Isle of Whithorn, and working night and day, burning the midnight oil in the Wheelhouse, to prepare the typescript for Archipelago 2:2. Our catch is one of the best (and biggest) we’ve ever landed. So there’s a lot of work to be done, checks and balances, and ‘casting off’, in that other dialect, of the print works, and not the nautical one we so crave the moment we tie up at the harbour wall and find ourselves in dull and deadly lubberdom. As you see, on this last trip, we managed, by expert reading of the stars, to meet up with the intrepid kayaking historian David Gange, inspirational devotee of ‘big seas and small…
Category: Blog
Blog
All At Sea
This is how we are in August, all at sea, searching the waste of waters, fishing for issue 2:2. There’s only a temp in the office, to package orders, stalk through the Post Office with the mailbag, and drop in at the PO Box. There, the other day, to everyone’s delight, awaiting collection was a copy of the latest issue of the ASLEF Journal (that is the journal of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers & Firemen). We’ve long been in negotiation with ASLEF over a discretionary Archipelago subscription rate for the membership, many of whom have been dropping in at the London Review Bookshop and buying their copies there at the standard rate. This has more than once led…
ARCLIGHT
Welcome aboard the latest addition to the Archipelago fleet. One of our readers came upon her in Dundee harbour on, to be precise, 9 March 2021 CDE (Covid Delta Era) and after a phone-call with the Northern Lighthouse Board, we sealed the deal, well within our Tax year, enabling us to write her off at once, as we prepare to finance 2:2. She was ours in return for twelve copies of Archipelago 2:1 on condition we tow her away promptly. We haggled, starting the bidding at six copies, but the Board would have none of it. So twelve copies it was. A lick of paint and a few new fittings and there we were ready to put out. It was…
Omnium-gatherum
Update: Another superb new review of Lilliput Press’s Archipelago: A Reader (Edited by Nicholas Allen and Fiona Stafford) by Dan MacCarthy was published on 29th January 2022 in the Irish Examiner. Click here to read the review. Further press coverage in the Irish Times from Saturday, December 4th 2021 (click on the image or click here for a more legible version) Omnium-gatherum Here to remind you of Lilliput Press’s Archipelago: A Reader, edited by Nicholas Allen and Fiona Stafford, and launched in Convocation House, Divinity School, The Bodleian Library, Oxford, on 10 November, and by Zoom from the Dublin Literary Festival, the next day. Surely, the ideal Christmas present for all those of an archipelagic persuasion. Here’s what M.…
Until Depth Do Us Part
The Harbour Light . . . . . . . . . . . . lowered and lifted – a canary in a mine-shaft fluttering guttering but unquenched. Lead kindly as she wrangles and haggles for passage through wheeling collisions of light flashed at death’s threshold, hell’s mouth, heaven’s gaping gate, the narrow strait and close scrape, Davy’s Locker and lamp together, rocky seamark and landmark vying on a soul’s darkest before the dawn, gull and gale crying until depth do us part – glass-eyed cod, haddock, monk, on ice – the crew, lids propped, dying to turn in, to drown in sleep until they wake restless to put out again as much for the sake of it as for…
After Tim Robinson’s Time in Space
i.m. Máiréad Andrew McNeillie and Tim Robinson at Roundstone, March 2001 After the obituaries, the éloges and sail-shaped remembrances. After the crowds have left on the boat and the pollution of their footfall dies away with the evening. After autumn’s equinox begins the purer dream of winter – that’s when to settle in to work and when I’ve thought of you most often, in the capital of monochrome, at Fearann an Choirce, in your storm-walled house with its empty window-frame, overlooking the west. And after all now, I find myself thinking of you all the time – bald, and silent as a Buddha as you’ve become, staring from a photo on my wall, from the night we first met, as…
Number 13
Since Archipelago 12 sailed into the world, we’ve all been stood down, though the wheelhouse is still spinning in its wake and beside itself. I gave the Tannahill Lecture at Glasgow University in February: ‘Theatres in the Round’, about islands, from Inis Mór to Whalsay, and their lives, in print, in image, and in themselves. The lecture was subsequently edited into five parts and published in the culture pages of the Scottish daily the National – a fine institution, very much of the times, proud to be dismissed by the quisling Michael Gove as ‘The worst newspaper in the world.’ Meanwhile Brexit glooms over Scotland the latest cauchemar out of England. Send it home to think again: Enlightened Scotland must…
Night-Snow
Night-Snow wee song for Sydney Graham The real poem never ends. The blizzard beneath its last footprint is where we search in its memory, the blizzard that is also night as fresh on your face as snow. Night-snow the ultimate a body must weather, body I say, but I mean soul out on the manhole sea where the littoral-minded sail beyond Cape Metaphor to be. And Sydney Coastguard keeps his watch ticking on course for Greenock, with Alfred Wallis at the wheel aboard the good wreck Alba. For who but a blind one can’t see Scotland from Cornwall? – every small hour of the year with the heart in the right direction and a glass to his eye. In…
Richard Murphy
Richard Murphy was not just a friend of Archipelago and of the Clutag Press. Through his first collection of poems Sailing to an Island (1963), he was a key figure in the history of the entire venture, a founding father in what we might call the archipelagic turn, taken so notably also by Norman Ackroyd and by Tim and Mairead Robinson. Andrew McNeillie’s An Aran Keening (2001), given him by Bernard and Heather O’Donoghue, was he wrote in June 2016 ‘the last prose work I have read from cover to cover with joy all the way’ and on its author’s birthday 12 August that year ‘What a good decision you made at the age of 22, it seems to me,…
The Last Voyage
‘Winter Tide: The Last Voyage’ Andrew McNeillie © 2017 If you’ve ever wondered what all this is about, track down Jos Smith’s essay ‘Fugitive Allegiances. The Good Ship Archipelago and the Atlantic Edge’ in Coastal Works (OUP, 2017) edited by Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom, and Jos Smith himself. It gives the richest and most inspired and inspiring account of the project and its origins you could wish for. Rarely would that same good ship put in at Cill Rónáin, Inis Mór, in August, at the height of the tourist season. But it did this time. And it rained Biblically for three and a half days out of five, with one truly fair day in between, as just deserts for such…