The Hundred Thousand Places

To walk through a landscape is to be part of a slow unfolding of time and distance, to commit yourself to an adventure. “The Hundred Thousand Places” is a single poem that travels across seasons, through a variety of Scottish highland and island landscapes, from dawn to dusk. Make an early start, ‘feel your way out/into what might – take form’. It is a long walk, along the coast, over mountain and moorland, through pine and birch forest, ending on a shore where the sea offers ‘another knowledge/wild and cold’. Attentive and responsive, the unhurried pace of Thomas A. Clark’s writing draws the reader into a shared journey, pausing on the possibilities of a phrase, the music of the names of trees and flowers, or turning the page to open new horizons.

Reviews of The Hundred Thousand Places

'Thomas A Clark is an installation artist whose book-length sequence The Hundred Thousand Places explores the landscape round Pittenweem on the Fife coast. There is little of Wordsworth's egotistical sublime on show here…The Hundred Thousand Places stands at a tentative and oblique angle to the more established modes of pastoral writing.' – David Wheatley, the Guardian.