Featuring Jane Burn's 'My Dawtie', which won the Silver Wyvern Award in 2018.
An ethnographic bricolage of fragmentary narratives and lost voices from a future tribal culture of survivors following the Second Great Flood, Remnants provides glimpses into the myths, rituals, songs, customs, lifestyles, dream visions and the intertwining personal stories of a post-apocalyptic community existing in the ruined shadows of our own civilisation. Jane Burn and Bob Beagrie weave an unsettling tapestry of possible subjectivities navigating the margins between endurance and extinction in the not too distant future.
The collection considers what has been and might yet be. What scraps we remember, what has formed and shaped the poets’ memories and minds. Through recalling forgotten dialects and language, Bob and Jane dip in and out of history, religion and ancient myths and rebuild themselves again.
PRAISE FOR REMNANTS:
“Two poets, each with their own distinctive voice, explore what might be salvageable from a sense of the past and future existing ‘only as a spectrum of possibilities’ through myth, lore, and a fascination with the richness of half-lost languages, including Old English and North East dialect. Their post-apocalyptic visions are rooted in realism and create a rich, unsettling collection, linguistically inventive and compelling. The range is breath-taking: magical creatures from classical myth to the ‘Book of Revelation’ rub shoulders with ‘Crusoe Recycled’ and ‘Oldfriend Woman’, while totem stags, wolves, hares and whales shimmer through the poems. Both Burn and Beagrie are powerful poets whose imaginative evocations of survival beyond ‘the Badtymes’ and ‘the Deluge’ set spark to and refract each other’s light (and dark) in this remarkable collaboration.”
– Pippa Little
“The Remnants in this collection are what’s left when our false certainties are stripped away: fragments of faith and folklore, ragged scraps of our cultural identities. Together, Jane Burn and Bob Beagrie take these patches and sew them into a bright quilt of language, warm as a storyteller’s hearth and coarse as a wolf’s tongue: a quilt that becomes a landscape seen from afar – a landscape that bears the scars and stories of all our ancestors.”
– Oz Hardwick