Due to Germany’s role in World War II and the crimes of the Nazi regime, the expulsion of millions of Germans from territories in the east of Europe received little sympathy at the time, and little recognition later. But the Germans of East Prussia – territory that would become part of the Soviet Union and Poland in the re-ordered post-war Europe – left  behind lands in which the German culture had flourished for centuries, a land of forest, lakes and legends of the Teutonic Knights, birthplace of Immanuel Kant and Käthe Kollwitz, and a place that of course still exists and yet has been changed so dramatically over the past half a century that it can truly be described as the “Forgotten Land” of the title of Max Egremont’s book.

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Review by Sharon Blackie:

‘I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking’, said Thoreau in his essay on precisely that subject: ‘… that is … who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering .’ One suspects that Robert Macfarlane, as presented in his latest book The Old Ways, would have met with Henry David’s approval. For whatever else there may or may not be in this book, there is indeed a clearly displayed ‘genius for sauntering’, as Macfarlane sets off to explore a disparate collection of ancient paths by land and sea, in the British Isles and elsewhere.

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New release from our friends at Two Ravens Press:

The Simple Men is the second full collection of poetry from David Troupes, an American poet living in West Yorkshire. He applies an assured, eccentric craftsmanship to innovative forms and ambitious insights. The poems of The Simple Men range over hills and down rivers, through truck stop diners and wedding parties, renewing at every turn our relationship with land, love and the self.

An extract from The Simple Men

The Allagash

We were a long time getting there,
an eight-hour succession of highways
past hayfields and pinewoods, potato country,
blink-and-miss-them towns rich
only in poverty, a great
weathergray barn in the middle of its century-
slow ooze down the hillside,
the old God-lump of Katahdin
saluting as we passed, until what we call America
became what we call Canada,
though we weren’t heading that far, but instead
doubled back south, driven now
by the outfitter, the old-timer,
down seventy miles of dirt logging road
deep into the Great North Woods where
like a bird on its eggs
Maine waited—somewhere in the healing mess
of what we did, in the pollen haze
as evening cooled—waited somewhere
under the cloud-rinds as we launched
ourselves into the golden river
and the pace of the unhurried Allagash became
the pace of everything—waited
as daylight lingered in the treetops and we found
not fifteen minutes into it
a female moose and her calf wading the warm
stone-shallow waters, calmly nosing for their meal—
the time they took to raise their heads
and weigh us up and walk into the dark weave
of the forest—my God,
                                    the time they took—

The Simple Men at Two Ravens Press