Offcumdens – “A really covetable coffee table book”

DREAMCATCHER ON OFFCUMDENS ~ This is a rare example of a really covetable ‘coffee table’ book to dip into for either visual or verbal nourishment.

In paperback and hardback

Nadia x

Here is the full review:

Offcumdens is a gloriously full-hearted collaboration, with a real symbiosis between image and verse. As Philip Gross writes in his endorsement ‘Each double page is a conversation.’ Storr’s work may well already be known to readers –through her elegant pamphlet Heart Murmur(Calder Valley Press, 2019); this collaboration with photographer Bob Hamilton captures Yorkshire so genuinely that it is hard to credit they are both (like your editor) an ‘offcumden’, meaning an incomer to the area. Although the front cover might suggest a focus on landscape, between the covers we find a myriad of Yorkshire personas, human and canine, alongside urban vignettes and traditional dales landscapes.

Familiar though the scenes may be to devotees of this landscape, the messages from these pairings is never predictable. The photos, like the poems, ‘tell it slant:’ for example ‘Cycle’ shows part of a wheel and a leg, taken from above and the bizarrely deconstructed reflection of it (a sunny dale in the dales – who’d have thought?). I especially enjoyed the photos where the yoking of sunlight and cloud are at their most weird – how opportune to capture a ‘Brocken Spectre,’ though as Storr remind us, waiting for the perfect image can involve much chilly hanging around. ‘Look at me. Not my image. I’m here. Freezing.’ (‘Walking Away’). The poems themselves bounce ideas off the images, so the spooky view from inside Gaping Gill (‘Harness’) sparks a thoughtful poem about parental ‘letting go.’

Here, as so often, there is real tenderness, as a foil to the wit and lightness of touch found in other poems. The dialogue is continued in the notes at the back of the book, where both poet and artist give their notes on the genesis of the pairings. Here there is an almost scholarly attention to detail, even when it records the serendipitous nature of the creative output. This is a rare example of a really covetable ‘coffee table’ book (do people still have coffee tables?) to dip into for either visual or verbal nourishment.

 Hannah Stone