Castle of Imagination

Black Holes and Paper Portals

Faye Latham

Poet and visual artist, Faye Latham, has created a series of erasure poems from Smythe’s A Kangchenjunga Adventure (1930). Exploring real and imagined landscape, the series explores black holes and dreams, with dark metaphors of the impact of climate change haunting throughout.

First published in 1930, F. S. Smythe’s book, A Kangchenjunga Adventure, becomes the canvas for this series of erasure¹ and collage poems. This series explores both real and imagined landscapes, taking the reader on a journey into the text through visual and lexical portals, black holes and dreams.

The cutout circles in the first and last poems are taken from photographs of landscapes and figure metaphorically as portals that transport the reader into the erased text. Whilst on one hand they are strange and ethereal, these circles also represent something far more real and frightening. The first circle alludes to the sun or a hole in the ozone, where the words and half-sentences beam down onto the ice.

In its original context, the pool of water in the photograph would have been seen as a part of the landscape. However, viewed with modern eyes and in the context of the poem, the ice is threatened by a nightmare sun and the water symbolizes a dark truth. The unnamed 'something' in the poem becomes a metaphor for climate change which puts the landscape at risk. An unnerving and sinister thread connects these pieces. Alongside romance, dreams and beauty, there is also blood and violence, a constant and underlying threat. The irreversible nature of erasure as a poetic form explores how our imagined landscapes of the future will not be born from creation, but destruction of the world we inhabit.

It is no overstatement to assert, as Ed Douglas does in his recent comprehensive opus titled Himalaya: A Human History, that the combination of altitude and climate is what makes the Himalaya so remarkable.¹ In approximately a hundred and fifty kilometres at its narrowest, the Himalaya is contained by the plains, or terai, to the south and the Tibetan plateau to the north. Within that distance the gain in altitude is as much as eight kilometres. This means that in a relatively brief distance you can move through an exceptionally wide range of ecosystems. For instance, we find subtropical broadleaf forests in the Siwalik foothills, mixed temperate forests of oak and rhododendron in the middle hills, firs and pines at higher altitudes. Pastureland above the tree line can extend well over five thousand metres. Above that, you are in an ecosystem like that which is found in the the Arctic.

Footnote

Erasure poetry: where parts of an original text are redacted to reframe the remaining words as a poem.

Dream #1

Dream #2

Warmth

Blood

Portal

About the Author

Faye Latham is a writer, visual poet and rock climber based in Snowdonia and London, UK. She completed an English degree at the University of Bristol in 2018 and a Masters in History of Art in 2019. Her work has been published in various literary journals and online magazines including UKClimbing.com and the Cambridge Literary Review. In 2021 she was awarded a grant with the Society of Authors and her pamphlet Ruin/Nation was highly commended in the Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition. Her debut poetry collection, British Mountaineers will be published in October 2022.

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