Rod Mengham’s multimodal work of essays, poetry and criticism was reviewed on Bookmunch. I was enamoured with this book that mediated on place and language and when I discussed his poem that is based on the fictional, but plausible, Nostratic dictionary devised by Palaeolinguist, Aharon Dolgopolsky, I wrote:

What Mengham does here is conjure a voice that is rooted, not in history, but speculation. We read as a family, or clan, ‘cook with stones’ whilst the father hunts for food creating a narrative for the kind of family we expect to have lived on Grimspound whilst toying with this expectation. We are dislocated from the actual historical moment and a lack of syntax accentuates, what feels like, an ethereal voice, yet there’s a continual irony impacted by its sense of being conjured and based on a fiction.

Read the full review here

photo: Carcanet