Republic Of Dogs/Republic Of Birds

Republic Of Dogs/Republic Of Birds is an urgent, meditative text of urban and rural language and landscapes. Its non-linear narrative moves between London's Isle of Dogs and the Western Isles of Scotland and is both a topographical journey through two landscapes and a highly personal meditation on the history and geographies of these locations. The writing itself is a form of activism, memorialising eroded cultures through their physical traces and the stories and voices of their inhabitants. Republic Of Dogs/Republic Of Birds is a lucid memorial text by one of the most astute and sensitive of writers on the relationship between landscape and time. The author's distinct and visceral poetic sensibility combines a fierce honesty, rooted in the realities of places he has lived and worked in, with a beautiful and explosive imaginative lyricism. Written on a typewriter in the 1980s, the manuscript was mislaid and lost. Found again in 2012 it was typed onto a laptop with minimal editing. First published in 2016 and republished in 2020, it is a text for and of our dissonant times.