Bardskull

I defy you to look at a river and not see your fast escaping life.

Bardskull is the record of three journeys made by Martin Shaw, the celebrated storyteller and interpreter of myth, in the year before he turned fifty.

It is unlike anything he has written before. This is not a book about myth or story. It is a sequence of incantations and a series of battles.

For each of the three journeys, he walks alone into a forest in the heart of Dartmoor and waits.

I will sit under the hazel and sing my calling songs and see what comes. I am not gambling for crescendo, climax, coda. I’m just going to keep turning up.

No dreamcatchers, no showy wafts of Tibetan scents. No Green Man figurines. There’s just a middle-aged guy visiting a place, over and over. Shuffling in and out.

What arrives are stories – fragments of myth and folk tale that he has carried within him for decades: the deep myths of Dartmoor itself, tales from distant family members, Arthurian legend, folk tales from India, Persia, Lapland, the Caucasus and Siberia.

But these stories and their tellers don’t arrive as the bearers of solace or easy wisdom. They come to challenge, to undermine, to sow doubt.

There are so few handrails when we really get into the spirit-forest, so few. All the furies just bang into one another.

But gradually, the nighttime pummellings of his dreams and the daytime wrestling with memories and stories resolve themselves. By the end of the book, he has crawled back into deep time when Devon was an ocean floor, when the places we call England, Europe and Ireland were one. He has arrived at a place before and after story.

Underneath every single person in the world is a cave filled with unimaginable wonder.

Bardskull can be read as a fable, as a memoir, as autofiction, as an attempt to undomesticate myth.

It is all those things, but it doesn’t come from nowhere. It takes its place inside a tradition that connects Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to D.H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse; Ted Hughes’s Moortown Diary to Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns; Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber to Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap and Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica to Nick Cave’s Sick Bag Songs.

It is a magnificent, unclassifiable work of the imagination.

Wonder is the world, without compare

Through feral tales and poetic exegesis, Martin Shaw makes you re-see the world.
DAVID KEENAN (author of Monument Maker)

Shaw encourages and illuminates the mythic in our own lives. He is a modern-day bard. MADELINE MILLER (author of The Song of Achilles)

In his hands language works as it is supposed to do and almost never does. His words seep straight out of the hill.   CHARLES FOSTER (author of Being a Human)

Terrifically strange and thrilling. MELISSA HARRISON (author of All Among the Barley)

Shaw is a one off: his work is urgent and necessary PAUL KINGSNORTH (author of The Wake)

A true master. Martin Shaw is one of the very greatest storytellers we have.  
ROBERT BLY (author of Iron John)

His work combines a magnificence of soul with a deft acuity of intellect… I am in awe. 
 JAY GRIFFITHS (author of Wild: An Elemental Journey)