Reliquiae: Vol 7 No 1 by Autumn Richardson

In Volume 7 No 1 there are symphonies of stone & of the turning of the seasons; testimonies to transmutations, to ‘thin places’, darknesses, and the not-quite dead; there are evocations of the goddesses Epona and Demeter, of presences within caves, the return of spring, awakening scents, and day’s dispelling of darkness; there are depictions of stoats, bears, crows, reedbeds and glacial landforms; new poetic renderings of the early Irish ogham stones, and ancient invocations of the ‘Great Goddess’; there are discussions of Giordano Bruno’s thoughts on natural forms, ‘innumerable’ worlds, and ‘ceaseless change’, and contemporary observations on the pathway to joy through touch and the contemplation of physical forms; there are nocturnes and deltaic lines, Norse creation myths & Tsimshian deluge stories; there are poetic reflections on the voices of water, the medicine of roots, on divination with bones, and the sealing of wounds; there are Babylonian magical petitions to the moon and stars, Heraclitus’ aphorisms on the natural world, new and old translations from the Poetic Edda, works from Anglo-Saxon leechdoms on bloodletting, and poetic explorations of the mythic far north.