Consolamentum
Poems by James McConachie
Consolamentum is James McConachie's debut collection.
McConachie lives in a remote farmhouse in the Matarraña region of Aragón, north-east Spain, where farmland gives way to wilderness, flourishing with an abundant and thriving biodiversity almost certain to be gone, forever, within a century.
The thickly-forested mountain behind his farmhouse is home to a ruined hermitage, dedicated to Mary Magdalen, but once used as a secret chapel by a community of refugee Cathars, fleeing the Albigensian crusade in France. The ‘Consolamentum’ is the Cathar baptismal and death rite and the last Cathar ‘parfait’, or priest, Guilhèm Belibasta, once drove his sheep along the ancient track that runs behind his house and on to winter grazing further south. The collection’s epigraph was his ‘prophecy’, spoken before he was burned at the stake in 1321.
The emptiness, beguiling beauty and solitude of the mountains where McConachie lives means that a sense of history is almost immediately felt, never far from the surface. There is the feeling of one’s place in an unbroken flow of generations. It has also been a territory of overlapping cultures, languages, wars, expulsions and flight; the Cathars, the Jews, Moors, Moriscos, the defeated Republicans of the Spanish Civil War. McConachie’s fierce poetic voice both rages at a new era of heartless wars and laments injustices. He wonders how many more summers he can endure there with drought and fire, the two great perils, more deadly and acute with each passing year. He hopes this first collection considers these themes fearlessly and with honesty.
McConachie has worked as a taxi driver, project manager, horse wrangler, hotel maintenance manager, translator and copywriter. His poetry has appeared in Iambapoet, Black Bough and Eat the Storms, and his essays and short stories have been published online and in print, with the Dark Mountain Project and Pilgrim House magazine. He is currently working on a second collection of poetry and an epistolary work of speculative fiction. James has been nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart awards.
Testimonies
‘Singular poems of language and love and the outsider life in a doomed Spanish landscape.’
Jeremy Dixon, winner of The Welsh Book of the Year with A Voice Coming from Then (2022)
‘Consolamentum is a studio of imagery. There’s music in the lines; the snapping of brittle consonants, the rustle of nature & sweet peals of diction. The poems in this book echo in your mind long after you’ve done reading.’
Jide Badmus, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated author of Obaluaye
‘An impassioned, lyrical debut collection, Consolamentum marries the rich, cultural and historical tapestry of the pastoral Matarraña region with a fearless engagement of modern injustices and war in a dwindling natural world. McConachie’s prescient voice laments the beauty and disquiet of contemporary lives born into a breathtaking landscape — one shaped by legacies of a politically charged era central to Federico García Lorca’s revolutionary work a century before…’
Vikki C., author of The Art of Glass Houses and Where Sands Run Finest
‘James McConachie’s debut collection is an earthy, sun-drenched tour-de-force, peppered with the language of his home in rural northern Spain. He takes the reader to remote wooded mountains, and brings us so close to animals, wild and tame, that we feel their hot breath. Beyond his breathtaking descriptive powers, McConachie has an unerring ability to unveil brutal injustice, to present us with human hurts, past and present, with a kind of poetic rage that is always finely controlled. This is a mountain storm of a collection. Hear its thunder.’
Lesley Curwen, author of Sticky with Miles and Rescue Lines
‘James McConachie is a man with a wilderness. His verse is as harsh, lush and striking as the Matarraña mountains he calls home. He writes of love, loss and wonder with lyric intensity of a Romantic and the hard-boiled cynicism of the Beats. These poems grow from the rugged landscape, rich in the mixed cadences of Spanish and English. Lyric and visceral, they come from a heart that has nothing to hide.’
Mark Fiddes, author of Other Saints are Available and winner of the Oxford Brookes University International Prize and the Ruskin Prize