/ slanted, Alison Glenny, Compound Press, 2024

        from APPENDIX: SÉANCE NOTES

 

S2.1

Small volume bound in dark

~

sheets brittle heavy
to the touch

~

astral tables ocean steamships
Gold letters gilt-edged

~

thin spines cracks

 from THE MOUNTAIN LOVER

. . . ] a perfectly good damper. Dipped
in demerara, pineapple pleases in slices.
Peaches from a tin slip down easily with
syrup. Breakfasts in darkness, swallowed in
haste, alpine starts require second repasts.
Luke-warm, sipped from a spoon, an
infusion soothes swollen lips. An ounce of
cocoa and quart of tea gives strength for
superfluities. Meals at strange hours means
forcing and nibbling, sometimes gorging
and a feast [

. . . ] a handkerchief of silk, so useful. Leg
of mutton sleeves beneath pelisses. Fur of
fox or lynx is garnish for a neck preserved
with creams. A complexion spoiled, spilt
milk. Hot water foments, no Cleopatras or
asses. Only a cheek that once was tender [

Alison Glenny

Alison Glenny’s longlisted collection is inspired by Edwardian mountaineer Freda Du Faur (1882-1935), an Australian who was the first woman to summit Aoraki Mount Cook. Alison borrows from Freda’s memoir, The Conquest of Mount Cook and other Climbs: an account of four seasons’ mountaineering in the Southern Alps of New Zealand (1915) and unpublished correspondence to Otto Frind.

You can listen to an abridged version of Freda’s book on RNZ.

Enter this sublime poetry, and you enter the terrain of light and peak, edge and step, avalanche and bouquets. The words form a soundtrack, a gift for the ear, a visual track, a gift for the eye, and a heart track, the mesmerising movement in the white space between, the silence, the icy snow. Reading becomes surrogate climbing walking ascending slithering transitioning contemplating. I stall on this book. I get lost and astonished within the book’s crevices and footprints. I am in the archives and I am in the mountains, wandering and wondering and absorbing. A insistent question. What do we scavenge and retain from the view, whether from alpine mountain side or buried archival file?

There are five distinct sections: a prelude, the archival borrowings, concrete poems, correspondence quotations, an appendix and a coda. Haunting movement on the page. Haunting travel in the mind. Resonant travel in the heart.

This book, this handbook of infinite travel.

The readings

‘under canvas’

‘conjured from thin air’

Alison Glenny is the author of The Farewell Tourist (Otago University Press, 2018), Bird Collector (Compound Press, 2021), and /Slanted (Compound Press, 2024), which responds to the queer life of the Edwardian mountaineer Freda du Faur. In 2019 she was an Ursula Bethell writer in residence at the University of Canterbury, and in 2024 the Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan City of Literature resident. She lives on the Kāpiti Coast.

Compound Press page