Scatterlings
“Scatterlings is about holding up the corner of the earth that has claimed you. It’s messy, opinionated, and asks more of you than you will likely want to give. It’s the tale of a myth teller making a circle round their den and bedding in. No tales of flapping Tibetan prayer flags, no wandering the deserts of North Africa. Over five years I’ve worked the crooked lanes of local story until I could go no further. Till I walked straight out of this century altogether.
It comes with a price attached. It’s recklessly insistent on the urge to kick your boots off, get down on your knees and kiss rough soil, crawl under barbed wire fences and touch the bark of holy trees, hoot and strut and weep and let the wild darkness get its beautiful paws on you once again. Hurl whisky on the grave of Joe Strummer, kiss the wounded, spend a night in a hollow tree. Taste the golden milk from the teat of a rain bear. Un-refine yourself. Un-civilise yourself. It’s about the hundred secret things. For all its bookishness, for all its insistence on study, make no mistake, what it desires most is to get you out where the buses don’t park. What it calls for is a kind of elegant disintegration. What follows is a different kind of activism, a different kind of thinking.”
£18.00Add to basket
Scatterlings by Martin Shaw, available from Cista Mystica Press (White Cloud Press, 2016; Cista Mystica Press, 2019).
Praise for Scatterlings
“Martin Shaw is, without exaggeration, the most powerful writer of prose that I have read. In Scatterlings, Shaw casts off the domesticated language with which we have been inundated since our birth, and something wild, ancient, intelligent, and incredibly strong enters his words. And as those meaning-filled words penetrate us, deeply sleeping parts of the self begin to awaken. We see again with luminous eyes, hear again the shimmer of Earth in language; a portal opens and the power of out there begins moving through the in here. A wild light begins to gleam in our eyes, our hair grows long, our language begins to shift, and in some inexplicable way, as humans long ago understood we could, we begin to become old growth ourselves.” –Stephen Harrod Buhner, award-winning author of Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm
“The heart has a true north, says Martin Shaw. He uses it. His work combines a magnificence of soul with a deft acuity of intellect, portraying a quintessential comprehension of the human spirit in its mythic path. He writes in a rare register of an earthy seer and I am in awe.” –Jay Griffiths, author of Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape
Scatterlings
“Scatterlings is about holding up the corner of the earth that has claimed you. It’s messy, opinionated, and asks more of you than you will likely want to give. It’s the tale of a myth teller making a circle round their den and bedding in. No tales of flapping Tibetan prayer flags, no wandering the deserts of North Africa. Over five years I’ve worked the crooked lanes of local story until I could go no further. Till I walked straight out of this century altogether.
It comes with a price attached. It’s recklessly insistent on the urge to kick your boots off, get down on your knees and kiss rough soil, crawl under barbed wire fences and touch the bark of holy trees, hoot and strut and weep and let the wild darkness get its beautiful paws on you once again. Hurl whisky on the grave of Joe Strummer, kiss the wounded, spend a night in a hollow tree. Taste the golden milk from the teat of a rain bear. Un-refine yourself. Un-civilise yourself. It’s about the hundred secret things. For all its bookishness, for all its insistence on study, make no mistake, what it desires most is to get you out where the buses don’t park. What it calls for is a kind of elegant disintegration. What follows is a different kind of activism, a different kind of thinking.”
£18.00Add to basket
Scatterlings by Martin Shaw, available from Cista Mystica Press (White Cloud Press, 2016; Cista Mystica Press, 2019).
Praise for Scatterlings
“Martin Shaw is, without exaggeration, the most powerful writer of prose that I have read. In Scatterlings, Shaw casts off the domesticated language with which we have been inundated since our birth, and something wild, ancient, intelligent, and incredibly strong enters his words. And as those meaning-filled words penetrate us, deeply sleeping parts of the self begin to awaken. We see again with luminous eyes, hear again the shimmer of Earth in language; a portal opens and the power of out there begins moving through the in here. A wild light begins to gleam in our eyes, our hair grows long, our language begins to shift, and in some inexplicable way, as humans long ago understood we could, we begin to become old growth ourselves.” –Stephen Harrod Buhner, award-winning author of Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm
“The heart has a true north, says Martin Shaw. He uses it. His work combines a magnificence of soul with a deft acuity of intellect, portraying a quintessential comprehension of the human spirit in its mythic path. He writes in a rare register of an earthy seer and I am in awe.” –Jay Griffiths, author of Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape