To the End of the Land — Martin Heslop & Helen Tookey

I hold out my hands    to show they are empty
that we’ve come    for a while    to the end of things

The layered histories and complex geography of Nova Scotia – its mountains, mines, lakes and bays – are the settings of a new collaborative work by Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey. To the End of the Land investigates this remarkable landscape, and draws out the voices – under the seabed, under the storm – that animate it all.

Developed during a residency at the Elizabeth Bishop House, in Nova Scotia, Canada, To the End of the Land is a sequence of poems – presented as texts, and also embedded in sound compositions – in which past, present and future slide across each other. The book, and accompanying album, is a speculative poetic narrative in which two people (who may or may not be occupying the same reality) move through spaces that are grounded in the real landscapes of Nova Scotia, but are at the same time imagined or dreamlike. All of the sounds used in the audio tracks were recorded by Martin and Helen while they were in Nova Scotia and then altered and remixed to build up compositions that weave around the words. The tracks also feature fragments of Gaelic songs, from the sound archive at Cape Breton University, Canada.