Sherborne Literary Society presents Amy Jeffs : Wild - 30/11/22
In this beautiful book, the Sunday Times bestselling author of Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain takes the reader back into the medieval mind, exploring ancient myths and poems rooted deep in the British landscape
Sheer cliffs, salt spray, explosive sea spume, thunderous clouds, icy waves, whales with mountains on their backs, sleet, bitter winds, bleak, impenetrable marshes, howling wolves, forests, the unceasing cries of birds and the death grip of subterranean vaults that have never seen the sun: these are wild landscapes of a world almost familiar...
In Wild, Dr Amy Jeffs journeys both on foot and through medieval texts, offering the reader an insight into a world at once distant and profoundly close to home. The seven chapters, entitled Earth, Ocean, Forest, Beast, Fen, Catastrophe and Paradise include Amy’s haunting retellings of venerable tales and the places where she finds them reflected in Britain today, from the bat-haunted darkness of ancient barrows to the cacophony of a pub wassail. Amy’s sources include Old English elegies, The Exeter Book, the Welsh Englynion and the Irish immrama, and many of these stories focus on figures whose voices often go unheard in the corpus of medieval literature: women, outcasts, animals.
Illustrated with Amy’s original wood engravings, evoking an atmospheric world of whales, wolves, caves, cuckoos and reeds, Wild lets us look through the eyes of those who walked these ways before us, and will leave readers feeling ‘westendream’: delight in the wilderness.
Wednesday 30th November, 7pm start
The Digby Memorial Hall, Sherborne
Tickets £9 for Literary Society members, £10 for non-members
/Tags: Sherborne