Uneasy Pieces

Uneasy Pieces is a score composed in uncanny spaces and around silence. The sequence moves across borders and the centuries, documenting bodies asleep and wakeful, damaged and desired. Here are fugitive auroras and black holes, as well as miniscule misprints and ink blots, improvised intermissions and equivocal acts of translation.

Uneasy Pieces is the latest poetry pamphlet of the writer and book artist Nancy Campbell. It follows non-fiction titles Thunderstone, The Library of Ice and Fifty Words for Snow, as well as the poetry collection Disko Bay and artist books and projects The Polar Tombola and How to say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic. Nancy is a former UK Canal Laureate and has undertaken a number of residencies with research institutions in Europe and the Arctic; in 2020 she received the Ness Award for environmental writing from the Royal Geographical Society.

Proximity and distance are the two poles from which Nancy Campbell tensions these delicate, teasing, coolly impassioned prose poems. Like letters within letters, endlessly re-readable, these fourteen poems spool away into heart-breaking abstraction but are always true to the earthly – to snowfall, a mulberry tree, primroses, the colours of a bruise on an arm.—Martyn Crucefix