BLACK APPLES OF GOWER
Iain Sinclair (Little Toller Books)
Iain Sinclair’s latest foray into the labyrinthine workings of memory and landscape is many things: an exceptional portrait of a much romanticised (and Googled) coastal walk, a treatise on the numerous artists this location has inspired as well as a winding discourse on the leylines our memories and studies create between disparate subjects.
Facing up to some lingering guilt often albatrossed on those border-crossers who don’t return to Wales is Sinclair’s stated impetus for beginning this journey, and, by the book’s end, the question of whether atonement or reconciliation is achieved is up for debate but what is surely indisputable is the sheer joy and wonder the book radiates for both the literal winding pathways of his youth and the cognitive hinterland this landscape reveals to him. As Sinclair himself puts it: Place is poem.
AJ
Price: Paperback £10, Hardcover £15. Info: www.littletoller.co.uk
