‘Crossing Paths’ (Black Cat Press, 2026)

Written between December 2023 and July 2024, Crossing Paths is a collaboration between poets Jean Atkin and Richard Skinner, both keen walkers, both of whose work is informed by the natural world and the human experience of exploring it. The walks in the collection were taken separately, and in many different locations. They would each pass a poem across, then write a new poem in response. The poems map landscapes from the Coast to Coast walk across northern England to the Berwyn mountains of Powys; from the ‘rock-hop tussock-clamber’ of Seefin in Cork to ‘the woollen stockings / of Kirkby Stephen’; from ‘paths scrambled to a spirit level’ near Aberfoyle to Cheshire, where you may ‘Wish now on Whistlebitch, for the lost wells, the dew ponds’. Crossing Paths is a book of poems about walking, place, nomenclature and nature.