Writer, visual poet and climber Faye Latham shares selected poems from her upcoming collection.

British Mountaineers is a series of poetic erasures, where words on a page are removed and the remaining text is framed as a poem.

Written in 1942, F. S. Smythe's biographical text, British Mountaineers, forms the original canvas for this collection where words are picked, painted and stitched together to create a new, dream-like narrative.

Akin to following a narrow Alpine ridge, each page treads a delicate line between poetry and visual art linked together by the fictional experience of an avalanche victim. Buried under the snow, this lost spirit is guided through the strange and elemental landscape of the page from word to word, trying to make sense of their collapsed surroundings.

Raising questions regarding our relationship with a history which has glorified the conquering of mountain lands to rewrite and remove the stories of so many, British Mountaineers tracks the journey of an anonymous figure found by reading between the lines. It explores the ways in which a mountain might change us; what it might reveal, and what it might erase.

Below are samples of the poems included in the book.

British Mountaineers will be published by Little Peak Press in September 2022.