Recent years have seen the arrival of new approaches to writing about landscape. Partly to do with new eco-sensibilities, this is however also due to a realisation that landscape writing need not be confined to literary tourism, or the verbal equivalent of chocolate-box imagery, and to the injection of radical poetic styles. The Ground Aslant is the first volume to engage with this new wave of writing, and presents the work of Tony Baker, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Thomas A. Clark, Ian Davidson, Mark Dickinson, Mark Goodwin, Nicholas Johnson, Peter Larkin, Helen Macdonald, Wendy Mulford, Frances Presley, Peter Riley, Colin Simms, Zo Skoulding, Harriet Tarlo, Carol Watts.

Harriet Tarlo is at the forefront of a group of poets who take writing about topography and nature seriously; she finds new ways to express in challenging and exciting language ideas and images that could be beyond language but aren't, in her very safe and skilful hands. -Ian McMillan

At Pangeston (at Domesday, 1086), then Pengeston, Peniston, Penistone (Pen, Celtic for hill, here the great ridge between the Don and the Little Don), the highest market town in England, seen by any train traveller heading in and out of town on the 29 arch viaduct over the River Don: a field: through its creation (form) and its maintenance (labour), a field is, and has been since Neolithic succeeded Paleolithic times, a place where land and human meet, a meeting which originated with the clearing of the ground, the woodland and the animals, to create O.E. feld probably related to O.E. folde: earth, land, from P.Gmc.: plain, open land (OED).

These poems were all written as part of collaborative place-based projects with the artist Judith Tucker. They emerge from what could be described as fieldwork, poetry based on walking through, and engaging with, place, with Judith, and, increasingly, with people who live in and visit the areas concerned. Some research into the areas concerned has also taken place and contributed to the work. Up until this moment, they have been pieces in flux. Shorter related poems or fragments have been exhibited with drawings and paintings and many of these longer pieces have been read at openings and poetry readings. Here they can be seen as a body of work. Although the earliest of these poems was originally written in 2011 and the latest in 2019, they have been edited and re-visited throughout the whole period, and indeed the places are also re-visited. (Harriet Tarlo)

This is the first large collection of poems by Harriet Tarlo, and showcases all of her shorter poems from the 1990-2003 period. Her work is best described as radical pastoral, and readers with an interest in English landscape will find Ms Tarlo's unusual approach a breath of fresh air in what has become a moribund area of contemporary poetry.