Complete Maps

The resulting complete map seen here for Sally’s mark-up takes on the form of a flower/ butterfly. Loops (petals/ wings) are created by the jumps between each poem in orange.  The effect of her mark-up and map 'style' is to create small spatial clusters around the dominant topoi that almost read as poems themselves.  So, 'in the water' (detail) contains: 'pools and rivers'; 'trees and clouds'; 'the cressy banks'; 'the golden-sanded brooks'. Where the underlying chronotope is of the mind (distortion) this is felt even more strongly as if the places spring from the imagination.  Perhaps the best example of this is 'Far Country' as a poem about the narrator’s own youth with the related toporefs of: 'yon far country'; 'those blue remembered hills'; 'the land of lost content' and 'happy highways'. 

James’s map also has a flower-like quality but is far more focused around the four key sites he identifies. The complete maps show the  coalescence of a number of conceptual representations of Shropshire as a place, spanning specific towns, the county as a whole, and an idealised dream-like remembered version. It is likewise engaged with from inside the county, from the far-removed (and very different) London, and (in James’s version) from a spaceless bubble of philosophical musing.