‘At the extremities of life even language begins to creak and splinter. To get close to one of the most inhospitable places on earth, Catherine Faulds’ poems demonstrate that we need both plain description of the practicalities, so clear you could pitch your tent by it and words put under pressure to the point of disintegration, to capture the wonder and the strangeness, bordering on fear.’ Philip Gross

 

‘In this compelling sequence Catherine Faulds evokes a starkly beautiful but threatened landscape. With clear-sighted observation her poems celebrate this place of snow, ice and polar darkness while also displaying the tragic impact of environmental destruction.’ Jane Clarke

 

Catherine Faulds lectured in art and design and exhibited in the UK and abroad as a textile artist before starting to write poetry. She has been Highly Commended in, among others, the  Magma, Thomas Gray, South Downs, Frosted Fires and Oxford University's Science and Poetry competitions. Her work has been published widely, including in The Interpreter's House and the Welsh Poetry Competition anthology.

 

Catherine travelled to the Antarctic in the winter of 2013/14 with the artist Sara Davidmann, where they collected material for their mixed media exhibition Extreme. Catherine's pamphlet Decoding the Dark is the result of a visit to Arctic Svalbard in the twenty-four hour dark winter of 2019. She and Sara Davidmann collaborated again to produce works in text, print and sound, an approach which informs the poems in the pamphlet.