![]()
REBECCA HURST
In 2009, along with two friends – Johnny Marsh, a visual artist, and Siân Thomas, a writer – I began to create work in response to a small patch of Wealden woodland. Over the next two years we spent six full days, from sunrise to sunset, walking, sharing stories, and making environmental art. Although our collaboration looked from the outside like three friends pottering around a wood together, nonetheless what happened during that time – an act of dwelling as well as of making – stuck with me through the years that followed.
In 2014 I left Sussex for the second time in my adult life. The landscape I left behind, however, experienced through friendship, art, and years of repeatedly walking a loop of lanes and footpaths, stayed with me. I began writing poems that mapped the external geography of these walks, and of my internal geography as I made them. In addition to the pace of walking, the rhythms and impulses of oral storytelling, folklore, and fairy tales can be found in my poems.
While ‘Mapping the Woods’ documents a place I have known intimately and physically from birth, my imagination has always been free-roaming; I leave in order to psychically return; I return in order to experience and then act upon the impulse to leave. From my great-grandmother I inherited a mythical Eastern European landscape, experienced through old photographs, letters, and family stories. These stories, which shifted over the course of my childhood much like the borders of the region her family came from, left me with an enduring sense of the tension that can exist between personally embodied and imaginatively inherited landscapes. I am interested in what happens in the space between experiencing something and remembering it; and in what compels us to make art, instead of simply getting on with our lives. In my poems I interrogate and excavate the edge-lands that border the known and tangible world, and the messy dreamscapes beloved of surrealists, mapping wild places I have visited, both geographical and psychological.
*
WALKING DWELLING THINKING
This wood has a thousand exits and entrances:
stiles, gates and tripets, gaps and breaches.
This wood is hammer-pond, chestnut and chalybeate,
charcoal and slag heap, leats and races.
This wood hides the boar-sow in a thickety hemmel;
is home to the scutty, the flindermouse, the kine.
This wood is cut and coppiced and burned.
Each decade catched hurt – it takes a tumble.
This wood is two green and clay flanks pinched
by the link of iron bridge over water.
This wood keeps its secrets: the peaty-black
knuckerhole where the dragon lies sleeping.
This wood scolds with a tawny owl’s brogue
shrucking and shraping, kewick hoohoo.
This wood is ashen, eldern, and oaken
a mile from the village, ring-fenced, well-trodden.
This wood summons you from out of your house
to walk through leaf-fall and bluebells and moss.
MAPPING THE WOODS
Parson’s Wood, Mayfield, East Sussex
Longitude: 51.061001
Latitude: 0.308827
[…] woods are evidently places propitious for wandering, or getting lost in, all woods are a sort of labyrinth.
Francis Ponge, The Noteboo...
