Sky Ground Sky

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Sky Ground Sky is a narrative that explores how landscape and culture create individuals, and how our relationship with the living world can ultimately redeem us.

A cabin project beside two silver birch trees becomes the ground for reckoning with the past. The building process itself reflects a journey through place and body, an enquiry into how we can live and grow with our own history, and that of the land.

The memoir explores the relationship between family, community, self and earth.

It is a travelling and shapeshifting terrain, a glimpse into the shared moments, the transient joys of unbecoming. The narrative combines poetry, past and present perception, lyric essay and personal anecdote.

From a childhood between East Clare and London to years travelling across Southern Europe, Australia, Mexico and Indonesia, Sky Ground Sky is about finding belonging in the blurring of time and change, where memories pass through crumbling ground.

It is a narrative laced with dust, streams, cracks, roots, dreams, waterfalls; strangers and stranger places, landscapes both pretty and painful. 

In a blend of eco-poetry, childhood memory, travel writing, and lyrical reflection, this book explores the complex interplay between family and home, body and mind.

‘Sky Ground Sky’ is a celebration of creativity, communal experience and the vulnerability of being human.

Everyone who orders a copy will get a hand-painted bookmark.

Reviews:

“Ailbhe has woven, layered and excavated a memoir that evokes the landscapes - both real and emotional - that she describes with lucidity and sensory accuracy. With language that reads like ritual and poetry while being as clear and grounding as cold water, Sky Ground Sky is a wandering, deeply textural work that treats time, body, memory and landscape as one living breathing ecology. This work is a blend of eco-poetry, memoir, psychogeography and personal exploration that shapeshifts and time travels through the various terrains of memory, and is a work that is felt and experienced as well as read.

I felt deeply enchanted and moved by this book….

Sky Ground Sky captures the feeling of being both lost and found at once, and reminds us that we are often redeemed through shared presence, attention and creative witnessing.”

“Sky Ground Sky unfolds like memory itself… nonlinear, bruised and full of light. It is a feral and tender memoir, half secret, half song.”

A little more about….

I began writing this book in 2018 as a way of 'making sense' of time as it moved me: transient, ethereal, embodied and always. What began as a personal reclamation of my voice became a creative act of remembering, forgetting, and remembering again, a constant retrieval of the senses, away from all the noise and non-sense. This book is about the healing power of community and the ground we walk upon. The act of writing my life as it passed was embodied yet disembodied enough it proved able to balance the tides and salt my eyes, taking me safely away from ‘the moment’ as it edged me ever closer toward it. This book was written on the back of buses, bushes, scribbled down at dawn in my note book or app, midnight sleepless hostel dorm rooms, bustling cafes, crowded city streets, alone in my own head and full of cares, but also full of the raw pulsation of everything - the past and present iridescent, colours passing by the train-wreck, the sensation of falling, the silent music spinning out of it all. My head torn between two places. Moving about every few months, shifting grounds and stifled air. It was the will to hold and release the narratives I had inside my harddrive heart. Like snowballs, they gathered momentum inside me, taking on new layers of meaning with every passing place, new face. I wrote much of this book in the soft tissues of a life unfolding, so much the narrative has a foggy, momentary feel. The book explores how the land heals itself, and the destructive and constructive nature of the people we share it with.