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https://psychogeographicreview.com/buried-garden-lockdown-with-the-lost-poets-of-abney-park-cemetery-by-chris-mccabe/

Buried Garden: Lockdown With The Lost Poets Of Abney Park Cemetery, by Chris McCabe

Posted on 22/10/2021 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – Halloween 2021

Buried Garden is the fourth volume of Chris McCabe’s exploration of the so-called lost poets of London’s Victorian cemeteries. These burial places, now known as the Magnificent Seven, were established on greenfield sites on the edges of an ever-expanding nineteenth-century London in a bid to relieve the overcrowding of the capital’s inner-city churchyards and to house its growing army of the dead.

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This book, published appropriately enough on the day of Halloween, is an attempt to unearth, in a literary sense, the forgotten poets buried beneath the soil of Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington. Other volumes, three already published and another three yet to come, delve beneath the earth of the cemeteries at West Norwood, Nunhead, Tower Hamlets, Highgate, Kensal Green and Brompton.

mapAbney Park is the buried garden of the title. Like so many other cemeteries of this era it was once an immaculately-tended garden with flowers, lawns and trees, all providing a suitable backdrop for the memorial stones of Victorian certainty. Now, as with many others, it has become an overgrown tangle; perhaps not an entirely neglected space, but certainly one where nature has been allowed to reclaim her own. It is a place frequented by dog walkers, contemplative wanderers, dogged joggers, al fresco drinkers and unreformed lurkers.

To stand at the gates of Abney Park Cemetery is to stare through a portal into the afterlife. People walk past here all the time, missing the gateway.

 


https://psychogeographicreview.com/buried-garden-lockdown-with-the-lost-poets-of-abney-park-cemetery-by-chris-mccabe/


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