Unmoored - David Mullin

‘David Mullin’s new work ranges impressively across a landscape both pitiless and revelatory. ‘There is nothing to see here’, and yet the moor is also ‘everywhere’: one particularly striking section compares the moor to the moon, as they both hold ‘unexpected water’. Chapels turn into ships, and redwings are flood sirens. The landscape consists of delphs, pancheons, flaking wrens and a ‘grinding sky’: the reader may be struck by such a perceptive imagination, but the stratigraphy also ‘never lies’. The terse and alert poetics hold the power of the landscape momentarily in check, while conveying a sense of its ultimate elusiveness. With such innovative and beguiling work, we may be unmoored, but we are in safe hands.’

Antony Rowland

‘Stabilities are unclasped, charms are unearthed and alliances are forged with vast, ancient moorland in David Mullin’s stony, bony sequence, Unmoored. A wylde hymn to being undone and recalibrated by landscape at ‘the edge of cultivation’. Written in archaeological, attentive sherds, picked and polished, these deep-time fragments accumulate as a cairn on a barren, windswept moor. Mullin reveals barely-hidden wonders just below the surface of language and upland terra firma, how ‘Moor and moon’ are ‘differentiated by a single letter / seemingly remote… both holding / unexpected water’. This debut pamphlet signals a new voice in landscape poetry. ’

Tom Branfoot