Fiends Fell

Poetry. In FIENDS FELL, Tom Pickard charts a single year out of a decade spent on a bare hilltop near the English-Scottish border, with the roaring wind as his only guide. In journal entries interspersed with lyrics and poems, as in Japanese haibun, he records his daily life on the fells: landmarks of border balladry, weather and wildlife, bankruptcy and lust, the struggle "between appetite and attainment" (in Basil Bunting's words). The result is, among other things, a record of making, it...