Special Summer Book Offer!

This summer we are offering a special sale price for two of our recent collections: a spring 2022 exploration of ‘confluence’, Dark Mountain: Issue 21 and the full-colour autumn special edition, Issue 22 – ARK.

Find refuge from the heat with these explorations at the water’s edge. Get your copies here and find out more below. Offer ends 31st August.

Dark Mountain: Issue 22 –ARK What do you keep when the storm comes in, and the tide goes out? A book-as-ark you might not expect, with a cargo of stories gathered from the wreckage left by a flood that has already come. Our seeds are collected from felled trees and activist frontlines; our disappearing creatures discovered in dreams, our artworks made with ochres from a polluted shoreline and peat from endangered bogs; with insect wings, limpet shells, unloved spruce needles, titling ocean horizons. A work of beauty and creative salvage made in collaboration with the Wilderness Art Collective. (see editorial below)

Dark Mountain: Issue 21 goes beyond watery metaphor to explore confluence in its complexity: both life-affirming and death-bringing, nourishing and troubling, creative and destructive. Increasingly, the times we live in feel like a confluence of catastrophes: climate, ecological, political, cultural and existential. 60 writers and artists explore these meetings from the melting waters of the Antarctic Convergence to swirling microbial ecosystems within the human body. Created in collaboration with saltfront, a journal dedicated to a radically new type of ecological storytelling.

Notes on The Finding of This Logbook

Tear down the house and build a boat!
Abandon wealth and seek living beings!
– The Epic of Gilgamesh
Translated by Maureen Kovacs

We went down to the shoreline as we do, with our nets and baskets, to see what had been left behind. The storm and the king tide had washed mud up to the branches of the trees, those that remained and were not torn out and taken back by the sea. A few of their derelict forms lay stranded on the flats, halos of roots writhing toward the sky. Around them the mud was carved by small watercourses, like a map of a lost continent, or inverted blood vessels, the mark of the sea’s departure.

What we found deposited by the tide: boards waterlogged and broken at the ends, as though the surf had chewed them apart; bright shards of plastic going pale in the sun; sodden cardboard; thin films of tape. So much was clearly flotsam of some lost vessel. A chest wrapped in bands of iron; a painting depicting heaven and hell, though tipped on its axis and half buried in mud; a pile of matted canvas, tent or sail or burial shroud; a crumpled mask; a carved flute; a knot of human hair. It was not so easy to say the origin of other things: an erratic granite boulder on this shore of shale and mud; a cactus somehow taking root on a bare peninsula; fungi fruiting from the shaded mould; chips of ochre in the silt; the yellow bloom of a wild sunflower; a clump of woody heather, black soil still clutched in its roots.

Had they come on the tide or been revealed by the tearing of the waves? Everything in flux, every object melancholy in its broken edges, speaking of a lost home. Everything luminous in its disjointed mosaic beauty.

Scanning for salvage, we were met with the scent of this small cold stream emerging from the stone, flowing down to meet the rotting sea wrack,

We went to see what we might save, what might be of use, what exquisite scrap we might glean. We paused at the edge of the forest, where the mudflats begin. Scanning for salvage, we were met with the scent of this small cold stream emerging from the stone, flowing down to meet the rotting sea wrack, reflecting shards of light on the tree trunks. The electric shrilling of cicadas. The flash of an antler in the dappled light of the forest, caught in the corner of the eye. The sounds of now-rare birds off in the woods: nightjar, blue tit, mistle thrush. Turtledove, dunnock, carrion crow.

We shaded our eyes to follow a line of prints toward the tideline, large ovals with the marks of claws, slowly filling with water. The curving ribs of a ruined craft rose before the horizon’s clouds. As we blinked against the sharp light, the colours of the world seemed to invert, the foaming waves turning storm-black, the boat keel white as bone.

Some things were left intact: beside the little stream, as though in memorial to the vessel that had carried it, rested a child’s toy boat still bearing its enduring passengers. A coat with words stitched into its fabric, folded as if to pillow some absent head. And this book, found held in the crook of a tree limb, as though set on a shelf by the hand of the tide.

Dark Mountain: Issue 25

Our Spring 2024 issue is an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights, and by the living land itself.