A Stone Made of Circle: An Island Waybook
A Stone Made of Circle: An Island Waybook
Author: Hannah Close
Testimony to the ‘shaping of a mindscape in a landscape’, A Stone Made of Circle is an experimental island monograph from the salt-lashed edges of the Hebridean archipelago which tracks a voyage into themes as personal as they are universal—wildness, origins, belonging, enchantment—and a call for a radical reconnection to the living Earth.
A Stone Made of Circle is a collection of encounters with islandness. It is also one way of answering the question: what is an island? A work of briny imagination, this elemental ensemble takes us through the basaltic cracks of deep time, across roiling Atlantic seas to the shore’s edge to meet with ancient seaweed spirits, airborne lighthouse keepers, fierce weather gods, rollicking skeleton kings and living ancestors, all while reckoning with—and revelling in—life at the edges.
Diaries, essays, poems, notes, recipes and photographs make up this almanac of attention, which charts a journey through some of life’s most pressing questions: What does it mean to be kin… to be kind? Do we belong? Are we truly alive? What, in our collapsing world, is at stake? Based in the Hebrides, A Stone Made of Circle is a testament to the enlivening power of place.
All photographs by Hannah Close.
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About the author:
Hannah Close is a writer and artist. She is currently working on Islandness, a documentary exploring the spirit of place, alongside convening sea and shoreside residencies. She lives in the Hebrides with her dog, Rune.
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testimonials
“There is no pretence in this book. No gaping emptiness of artful words that rise, and break, only to collapse into the backwash of a want of lived experience. In contrast, Hannah Close is right there. Uncontrived. A woman coming into being, being born and giving birth into an island world where ‘something other than ourselves draws us out into that becoming.’ Here is no flight from humanity. Rather, ‘I am trying to touch the heart of it.’ Like anchorites who came by sea amongst these Hebridean isles in ancient times, Hannah pays attention to the roots of grace and beauty. You could maybe call her work philosophy. Certainly, poetics. She calls it ‘islandness,’ and gently mentors us in growing close, like lichen, nigh to soul.”
—Alastair McIntosh, human ecologist and author of Poacher’s Pilgrimage: an Island Journey
