Poetry review – CROSSING PATHS:
Sarah Leavesley admires a sequence of poems about cross-country walks by Jean Atkin & Richard Skinner which could be seen as a kind of rambler’s guide in verse
CROSSING Paths
Jean Atkin & Richard Skinner
Black Cat Poetry Press
978-1-0687799-5-4
27 pages £10.99
As the title CROSSING Paths and back-cover blurbs might suggest, this is a chapbook of poetry themed around walks/walking. But, crossing backwards and forwards between Jean Atkin and Richard Skinner, the paths these poems chart also takes in history, religion, war, life and death, as well as nature and the richness of place names.
I’ll start with the latter two because these are striking aspects throughout. Nature is everywhere in these poems, while the place names that thread through are important for the music within them, their beauty and their strangeness, as well as the ways they capture and anchor what these locations mean emotionally, historically and symbolically to those living near or passing through them.
In “The Birstwith Rapids”, Skinner gives us:
That touch of amnesia you left on Nought Moor,
the lapwings sounding like radios being tuned.
Similarly, later on, Atkin explicitly and playfully draws on this in her “Advice to Walkers in Uncertain Districts”:
Let down your hair in Ragged Kingdom.
Pay your own way at World’s End.
I say playfully, but this is not, for me, without a more serious edge in terms of the state of the world we currently live in.
Atkin and Skinner’s walks that inspired their collaboration may have been done separately and in different areas but history and the here-now walk hand in hand.
In Skinner’s “The Craven Faults”, the place takes on universal characteristics that remain as relevant (in different ways) to the times of Alkelda and pagan Danes explored in the poem:
Settle lies on the Fault, knuckles down between dales.
Attermire Scar looms above, a sentinel
Atkin’s “The Old Road to Black Mountain Chapel” is a pantoum on which lines from Sacred Songs & Solos, kept at the chapel, are intertwined with nature encountered on Cwm Eicen, the way of the valley of gorse. The poem closes with two images setting the living and the dead directly side by side:
Wildflowers in a jug on the window-ledge.
The last small graves gone under the hedge.
Like the walks, CROSSING Paths covers a lot of ground for a slim volume in terms of both form and technique. There are unpunctuated and fully punctuated poems, white space used in place of punctuation, indented lines, centred free verse, a triolet, pantoum and a short specular poem. I’ve not done these exact walks but I suspect this may all be part of mapping the terrain, places where repetition features in the landscape and/or space and/or more tightly demarked spots, as in Skinner’s short specular, “A Lane Near Askham Fell”.
Shape and pace may reflect some landscapes and how they’re experienced. Some walks may be faster, others slower and more contemplative. But techniques pulling the reader onwards need to do so while still ensuring important details aren’t missed. Both Atkin and Skinner manage this beautifully.
In Atkin’s unpunctuated centre-page “Paths in Mind”:
Like collies the clouds
stream down the fields
By contrast, in Skinner’s fully punctuated, longer-lined “Ingleby Greenhow”:
[…]
so quiet you can hear the wooden mice
wind their way through the wheat.
The spareness of Atkin’s lines (centred stanzas like small clouds?) slows its unpunctuated flow onwards to allow each image and sensation to register, so that nothing’s lost. Likewise, the richness in Skinner’s longer lines is accompanied by clause choices that keep meaning clear while punctuation slows reading enough to let each detail quietly sink in. These are, as elsewhere, complemented by skilful line-breaks.
Flow brings me to some of my other favourite elements and lines in these poems, those evoking water and light, which create their own paths intersecting these walks. For instance
the sky splits and
leaks of light fall down on Oswestry
comes from Atkin’s “Walk Towards Solstice”. This, like many of the poems I’ve already mentioned, is one where I’d love to quote more than just these few lines. Its incredible metaphorical imagery also includes likening the fading light in a yew wood to a clock calling time.
Meanwhile, Skinner’s “Cloud Inversion Over Aberfoyle” features stunning descriptions that include ‘a forest of throats’, with ‘[…] trees creaking / the old light of green dreams’. For me, this poem and his earlier “The Birstwith Rapids” are a reminder of the water and light within us too.
These details emphasise other aspects as well: the passing and presence of time that recurs throughout, but also the physicality of landscapes, the nature there and the human body. The linking and likening of these is, perhaps, a reminder of how intertwined they are.
Atkin’s striking “January at Castell Dinas Bran” starts with ‘A crow’s skull with a cold mind’ set among whitened stones. This brings to mind Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man”, but the poet-narrator creates an individual poetry path onwards from here. Stepping through ‘its empty eye’, the wind is a punch that forces the narrator to scarf-up and lean like a crow. I’m not going to give away exactly how this poem ends, as I don’t want to pre-empt it for readers. However, the final image links three ponies with their setting in a breath-taking way.
To be able to enjoy these places (while miles away at home) through these beautiful carefully crafted poems is a wonderful thing. More than that though, it has also made me want to go there myself with CROSSING Paths slipped into my pocket – as an atmospheric guidebook offering scenic wonders to look out for and capturing aspects of the place that only such poetry can.
Mar 25 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Jean Atkin & Richard Skinner
Poetry review – CROSSING PATHS:
Sarah Leavesley admires a sequence of poems about cross-country walks by Jean Atkin & Richard Skinner which could be seen as a kind of rambler’s guide in verse
CROSSING Paths
Jean Atkin & Richard Skinner
Black Cat Poetry Press
978-1-0687799-5-4
27 pages £10.99
As the title CROSSING Paths and back-cover blurbs might suggest, this is a chapbook of poetry themed around walks/walking. But, crossing backwards and forwards between Jean Atkin and Richard Skinner, the paths these poems chart also takes in history, religion, war, life and death, as well as nature and the richness of place names.
I’ll start with the latter two because these are striking aspects throughout. Nature is everywhere in these poems, while the place names that thread through are important for the music within them, their beauty and their strangeness, as well as the ways they capture and anchor what these locations mean emotionally, historically and symbolically to those living near or passing through them.
In “The Birstwith Rapids”, Skinner gives us:
That touch of amnesia you left on Nought Moor,
the lapwings sounding like radios being tuned.
Similarly, later on, Atkin explicitly and playfully draws on this in her “Advice to Walkers in Uncertain Districts”:
Let down your hair in Ragged Kingdom.
Pay your own way at World’s End.
I say playfully, but this is not, for me, without a more serious edge in terms of the state of the world we currently live in.
Atkin and Skinner’s walks that inspired their collaboration may have been done separately and in different areas but history and the here-now walk hand in hand.
In Skinner’s “The Craven Faults”, the place takes on universal characteristics that remain as relevant (in different ways) to the times of Alkelda and pagan Danes explored in the poem:
Settle lies on the Fault, knuckles down between dales.
Attermire Scar looms above, a sentinel
Atkin’s “The Old Road to Black Mountain Chapel” is a pantoum on which lines from Sacred Songs & Solos, kept at the chapel, are intertwined with nature encountered on Cwm Eicen, the way of the valley of gorse. The poem closes with two images setting the living and the dead directly side by side:
Wildflowers in a jug on the window-ledge.
The last small graves gone under the hedge.
Like the walks, CROSSING Paths covers a lot of ground for a slim volume in terms of both form and technique. There are unpunctuated and fully punctuated poems, white space used in place of punctuation, indented lines, centred free verse, a triolet, pantoum and a short specular poem. I’ve not done these exact walks but I suspect this may all be part of mapping the terrain, places where repetition features in the landscape and/or space and/or more tightly demarked spots, as in Skinner’s short specular, “A Lane Near Askham Fell”.
Shape and pace may reflect some landscapes and how they’re experienced. Some walks may be faster, others slower and more contemplative. But techniques pulling the reader onwards need to do so while still ensuring important details aren’t missed. Both Atkin and Skinner manage this beautifully.
In Atkin’s unpunctuated centre-page “Paths in Mind”:
Like collies the clouds
stream down the fields
By contrast, in Skinner’s fully punctuated, longer-lined “Ingleby Greenhow”:
[…]
so quiet you can hear the wooden mice
wind their way through the wheat.
The spareness of Atkin’s lines (centred stanzas like small clouds?) slows its unpunctuated flow onwards to allow each image and sensation to register, so that nothing’s lost. Likewise, the richness in Skinner’s longer lines is accompanied by clause choices that keep meaning clear while punctuation slows reading enough to let each detail quietly sink in. These are, as elsewhere, complemented by skilful line-breaks.
Flow brings me to some of my other favourite elements and lines in these poems, those evoking water and light, which create their own paths intersecting these walks. For instance
the sky splits and
leaks of light fall down on Oswestry
comes from Atkin’s “Walk Towards Solstice”. This, like many of the poems I’ve already mentioned, is one where I’d love to quote more than just these few lines. Its incredible metaphorical imagery also includes likening the fading light in a yew wood to a clock calling time.
Meanwhile, Skinner’s “Cloud Inversion Over Aberfoyle” features stunning descriptions that include ‘a forest of throats’, with ‘[…] trees creaking / the old light of green dreams’. For me, this poem and his earlier “The Birstwith Rapids” are a reminder of the water and light within us too.
These details emphasise other aspects as well: the passing and presence of time that recurs throughout, but also the physicality of landscapes, the nature there and the human body. The linking and likening of these is, perhaps, a reminder of how intertwined they are.
Atkin’s striking “January at Castell Dinas Bran” starts with ‘A crow’s skull with a cold mind’ set among whitened stones. This brings to mind Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man”, but the poet-narrator creates an individual poetry path onwards from here. Stepping through ‘its empty eye’, the wind is a punch that forces the narrator to scarf-up and lean like a crow. I’m not going to give away exactly how this poem ends, as I don’t want to pre-empt it for readers. However, the final image links three ponies with their setting in a breath-taking way.
To be able to enjoy these places (while miles away at home) through these beautiful carefully crafted poems is a wonderful thing. More than that though, it has also made me want to go there myself with CROSSING Paths slipped into my pocket – as an atmospheric guidebook offering scenic wonders to look out for and capturing aspects of the place that only such poetry can.