WELCOME TO ISSUE #1

“Names rise like outcrops on the rich terrain” Geoffrey Hill

OUTCROPS are landmarks, protrusions of stone, sediment, and soil built up over millennia. Poetry too is a natural elevation, of language rather than earth, but the comparison bears fruit. On one hand, geological formations formed by concentrated layers of particulate, and the careful crafting of form through line length, variation, repetition, tone, colour, and weight on the other. The difference is a matter of legibility.

Outcrop is a young publication. A shot in the dark. A search for contemporaries. In this, our inaugural issue, we start as we mean to go on. We have an international array of voices writing from different and distinct traditions – poets from the United Kingdom, China, Hong Kong, India, and America, some at the start of their journey, and some further down the path.

The various textures of nature and geography bind much of the collection together. Sarah-Clare Conlon’s ‘Drawing’s from a Sculpture’s Landscape’ and Hermione Byron Low’s ‘Moth’ explore nature in its relation to memory and art, the natural and unnatural aspects of erosion and decay, of minds, places, and objects. Devki Panchmatia writes with a scrupulous meanness, observing crabs and bats and the revolving complexities of thought in ‘Relief Comes From Natural Murder’ and ‘A Cauldron of Bats’. John-Michael Bloomquist conjures Mexico, its flowers, and mythologies, in ‘The Water in the Desert’, to which Izzy Hodgson responds with a condemnation of North American cultural symbols in ‘Jesus Lives in Palm Springs’. Likewise, James Appleby’s ‘Night Driving’ throws modernity against nature, albeit on the west coast of England.

As the collection develops larger ideas emerge to be reckoned with. Kushal Poddar’s ‘Bitter Gourd Song’ searches for something that approaches tranquillity, whereas Susanna Demelas disrupts the tranquillity of religious reverence through the erotic in ‘Teresa & I’, searching perhaps for different kinds of truth. Shuyi Mao eulogises her grandfather in ‘For My Grandfather’, and Namhara Byron Low uses fragmentation and compression to similarly mourn and celebrate. Irisa Kwok’s ‘Canton Equinox’ is a sweeping shout against the insurmountable, and Rosa Appignanesi also explores the liminality of the exile and outsider through her poem ‘At Brauron’.

Flora Leask’s ‘Too Much Poetry’ places poetry under direct observation, watching it shift and move, and Edward McLaren’s ‘Self Portrait as Clone of Jeanne D’Arc’ explores the shifting interpretation and depiction of his poem’s titular character. Last, though in no way least in the collection is Magnus McDowall’s ‘The Rules of Chess’, a character study of a different sort, of masculinity, misogyny, and a very ancient tradition.

The poems I have chosen to mention (in no particular order) illustrate some of the themes covered in the collection. There is also our interview with the inimitable Tim Tim Cheng on page 4 to look out for. Thank you for picking up a copy of Outcrop, we hope you love it as much as we do.

Sincerely

Haig Lucas

Editor

Haig Lucas is a poet and editor working across London and Edinburgh. Having launched Outcrop in summer of 2022, he looks forward to expanding the magazine and writing about birds.