The Little Hollow of Light and Shade

Not far from where we live in London there is a domestic house that hosts art exhibitions, the postROOM gallery. Their most recent show featured these wall texts by Thomas A. Clark, whose work I've discussed frequently on this blog. He has exhibited similar texts at the Cairn Gallery, as you can see in the YouTube clip I've embedded below. In this video he explains the significance of colour, font and location, e.g. blue text (blue is "always a matter of shades and tone of subtlety and instability") is placed under a window "looking onto the sky, which even in Scottish weather can often give a full range of blues." Here in London, entering the immaculate white kitchen-dining room of this Islington house from its small garden, you see a text above the space which seemed very apt when it was buzzing with conversation at the exhibition's opening evening: 'the grove of delight'. Condensed landscape poems like this bring nature into the home. They make you think about the poetics of space - how a room and a grove might have similar meanings for us. They also wittily interact with furniture and fittings: the lamp shade above could itself be 'a hollow of light and shade', and 'the place of stone' below is just above the stone floor, next to a rock-coloured armchair.

 

In one of my first posts on this blog back in 2005 I mentioned the Chinese tradition of inscribing poetic text at sites of natural beauty. I quoted one written by Yüan Chieh (719-772) which drew attention to a scenic terrace and cliff, recommending the place to those weary of the city. Wall texts within a home travel in the opposite direction: from a specific house to an unspecified grove or place of stone, rather than from a particular landscape to urban life in general. Like the poetry books Tom publishes, they leave space for the reader's imagination and recollections. In a world of short attention spans, their brevity is an invitation to pause and reflect, rather than flick forward to the next thing. The texts at postROOM are temporary, but visiting this exhibition you can't help wondering what it would be like to live permanently with these beautiful, simple inscriptions and whether they might, in a modest way, influence the thoughts and conversations of those who encounter them. 

the quiet island

Last year Carcanet published The Threadbare Coat: Selected Poems by Thomas A. Clark, a writer I have often referred to on this blog. There is an introduction by Matthew Welton that briefly discusses the poems' language and formal properties. He notes, for example, the repetition of words from poem to poem: 'the hills, clouds and water give us a sense of where we are in the landscape. And the mentions of nothingness, aloneness and longing, say something of what we can expect from territory of this kind.' He suggests that the 'reuse of a limited vocabulary across a range of poems feels appropriate to the landscapes that are the focus of these poems.' These places are only occasionally identified but it is clear that we are reading about the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Perhaps some of the poems are about the idea of this landscape rather than anything more specific - 'the quiet island', for example, is like a parable where the narrator finds peace but misses the melody of events, and so one morning, quietly leaves.

I could mention several of the book's landscape poem sequences but will just highlight one here. 'a walk in a water meadow' suggests that we will be given a series of ambulatory observations, but in the first stanza, a gentle mist closes in. This mist dampens sound and detaches objects from their context. The walker attends to the world in a different way: as places disclose themselves, vision is both impaired and repaired. The water meadow takes on the forms of mist: fine webs, cotton-grass and cuckoo-spit, alders wrapped in wool and skeins of mist snagged on larch. A walk in mist, he concludes, 'makes no progress / history is suspended / resolve dissolves.' History feels suspended in almost all of these poems, which offer the chance to concentrate on timeless phenomena: dusk and dawn, wind and waves, raindrops in a pool, light falling on a leaf, water flowing over roots and stones.

There is a YouTube clip where Tom introduces the book and reads 'the quiet island'. I have embedded it below and transcribed here what he says about the Highlands and Islands:

'These are landscapes of great clarity and resilience; they often have a surprising gentleness - all qualities that I want to percolate into the poetry.  But this is not where I live. I live on the east coast, above Edinburgh. So I'm always at some distance from the landscapes I write about. No doubt this distance sharpens desire. I always want to head out into the Highlands. Somehow I feel more relaxed there than anywhere else. I seem to be more responsive and resourceful than anywhere else. It's as if a whole set of cultural accretions has fallen away, or more likely, blown away. And this is one sense of The Threadbare Coat, the title of this new book from Carcanet Press. It's an image of poverty and exposure, as if there could be only the lightest membrane between you and the landscape.'

Frail songs by torrents

Yesterday evening I listened yesterday to a recent episode of 'Late Junction' in which Anne Hilde Neset was taken by Jana Winderen to a snowy forest just outside Oslo to discuss field recording. I have embedded a clip of this below, although I'm not sure how long it will be available.  I would actually recommend listening to the whole programme while you can (among other things it includes a wonderful Morton Feldman tribute on what would have been his ninety-second birthday, David Fennessy's 'Piano Trio - Music for the pauses in a conversation between John Cage and Morton Feldman').  Winderen talks about the way the sounds of the forest change completely day by day - sound like light has to be captured instantly or it is gone forever.  She has been waiting many years to catch a particular lake when it is just about freezing.  At that moment the ice is like a drum skin and if you tap it you can hear the sound flying over the surface.  But on the rare occasions when the lake has been in this state, she has happened to be without her equipment. "Then I just have to listen to it with my ears and remember that, recorded in my memory".

After listening to this programme I took up a book, the latest collection of Thomas A Clark's poems, Farm by the Shore.  As I read it, I kept thinking of the deep listening and close attention to landscape that Jana Winderen describes.  Poems refer to the drone of the wind, the water song in leaves, the lapping of little waves, unquiet on quiet.  A small brown bird hidden in glancing light seems to vanish when it stops singing.  There is often a focus on such moments, when what is observed offers an insight into the processes of thought.  'Quicker than tadpoles / in pools the shadows / of tadpoles in pools / or the notion of shadows / of tadpoles in pools.'  There are places, these poems suggest, to which you can retreat to tune the mind or simply find repose in the shadows of trees.  Jana Winderen's recording includes the sound of tadpoles at rest, hibernating in their cold winter pools, waiting for spring.  Waiting is essential for her too, as she "concentrates into the environment" and begins to notice small things or experience chance phenomena like snow falling from a tree.  It is easy to picture Thomas A Clark walking the winter woods and listening to them with similar quiet patience: 'snowflakes on eyelashes / frail songs by torrents.'

Lorca's Olive

Laurie Clark, To The Hills, 2006

A recent survey by Jeremy Cooper, Artists' Postcards: A Compendium, divides the field into ten categories (aside from promotional postcards), each of which could be illustrated with cases involving landscape imagery.

• Artist-designed postcards - there are many examples; in an earlier post here I am holding up one that features in the book - by Francis Alÿs, a view of a flat sea with a description of the artist's journey on the reverse.  See also the postcard by Laurie Clark above.  Artists have been designing postcards since their invention.  The future Expressionist Emil Nolde earned money by designing them in the 1890s and his strangest designs were a sequence of giant faces drawn into mountain ranges.

• Manipulated postcards - where artists overpaint or erase parts of an image; in Bridges for example Tim Davies covers over the landscape to leave their structures floating in space.  I get the impression many artists have done this privately - I've referred before to playful postcards sent to friends by Peter Lanyon and Cooper includes an example by Josef Albers in which he has overwritten an aerial view of the woods near Black Mountain College.

• Composite postcard pieces - a fine example of an installation involving a collection of photographs is Susan Hiller's Rough Seas, which I described here at the time of her Tate exhibition.

• Postcards in collage - John Stezaker's uncanny film star portraits with landscape postcards over their faces are a well-known example (on show at the Whitechapel recently).

• Boxes, sets and books of postcards - among the book's examples of these kinds of work there is Carl Andre's Three Works on Land (1979), a concertina of nine black-and-white postcards documenting three land art sculptures: 'Angellipse', 'Timbering' and 'Quadrill'.

• Postcards in mail art - this art form which emerged alongside Fluxus is obviously central to a discussion of postcards in art and the book includes many examples. Michael Leigh's The Arses of Scotland (1996) can be seen in a Lawrence Norfolk article on the Tate Archive. 

• Postcard presses, designers and photographers - this disparate category includes the output of presses I've often referred to here, such as Coracle, Wild Hawthorn and Moschatel.  Among photographers Paul Greenleaf has dealt with landscape in projects like Correspondence (2007-9), where he re-photographed scenes from 1960s postcards.

• Political/polemical postcards - a category defined more by purpose than form, this includes Peter Kennard, one of the artists associated with the Leeds Postcards collective, whose oft-reproduced Haywain-Constable (1821) Cruise Missiles (1983) was produced as a postcard for CND.

• Graphic postcards - Thomas A. Clark's postcard for his Moschatel Press, below, is an example of a purely textual image; the book provides another one by Peter Liversidge printed in a font that looks as if it might disappear in snow: In the bleak mid-winter months very little stirs on the North Montana Plains (2000).

 Thomas A. Clark, Anything which is understood is a postcard to yourself, 2008

• Postcards as pictures  - lastly there is art in which postcard images are transferred into paintings, as in the photorealism of Malcolm Morley, or prints, like the Katharina Fritsch images of Essen that I've mentioned here previously.

The other artist I mentioned in that earlier post on Fritsch and postcard-based landscape art was Tacita Dean.  She is quoted in the introduction to Artists' Postcards: A Compendium: 'recently I have begun, quite unintentionally, to collect old postcards thematically.  It started with finding an attractive postcard of a frozen water fountain.  On finding the second frozen water fountain, I had begun a collection...'  Among her postcard-related works is Washington Cathedral (2002), two grids of non-identical found postcards published at different times; the cathedral was begun in 1907 and only finished in 1990 so these postcards represent a colorized dream of the yet-to-be-completed monument.  She also produced an edition of postcards linked to her film The Green Ray; I said here recently that the green flash of the setting sun is difficult to see on screen but it is visible in the postcard.   

Here is Jeremy Cooper's description (he is fond of exclamation marks) of another Tacita Dean postcard, Lorca's Olive (2007), inspired by a trip to Cadaqués, where 

'her host informed her that his grandfather used to tell of having seen the painter Salvador Dali and the poet flirting in a particular olive grove in the village!  Dean looked for the olive grove but discovered it had been destroyed by a fire, only one tree remaining.  She photographed the tree and made it into a postcard, as if from the 1920s, the time of the alleged affair, putting two coats of silver on the surface of the black-and-white photograph to give the impression of age.' 

This postcard is referred to at the end of a 2011 James Purcell review of an exhibition of personal postcards at the Federico García Lorca Foundation, curated by Martin Parr.  'The framed cards extend along the wall in an unbroken line. But look closer, and you can find the moment when Lorca’s correspondence ends. The family postcards themselves sweep on, albeit with gaps in time. No mention is made of the atrocities, grief and terror having been expressed elsewhere, privately...'  Tacita Dean's postcard, which featured in another exhibition at Lorca's house/museum in Grenada, can also be related to the writer's death.  After being killed by a Fascist militia his body was dumped among olive trees, or so it was thought.  'The postscript to the postcard: Lorca’s presumed grave was excavated in 2009, and was found to contain no bodies. To date, there is still no news of Lorca’s whereabouts.'

Heard beyond the mountains

So it seems I have now been writing this blog for exactly ten years.  If I had considered this when I started and realised it was going to have more than one or two actual readers, I might have come up with a better name for it...  I recall being too eager to get down to it to think beyond the idea that it would be about 'some landscapes'.  That first post in November 2005 was about two works by Richard Long and Hamish Fulton combining sound, text and art - three ways of addressing landscape through culture that I have continued to write about ever since.  All the subsequent posts are still available on my clickbait-free sidebar, or they can be accessed through the index (itself now nearly 20,000 words long) or through the Google maps I recently added.  However, rather than look back on what I have covered over the years, I thought it might be good here to celebrate other people's blogs that I have particularly enjoyed, with a few autumnal images and quotes thrown in.

'The sun passes lower in the sky, bringing the quickening rush that starts the long winter months. Tresses of drying peppers spread like flames across sheds, turning the stone walls into scenes of tropical design. The elegant stems of onions that have spoked all summer above the swelling bulbs are plaited, woven together like hands in a dance, and hung out of the way of snow. Felled trees are hauled by donkey from the forests, wearing a glaze of lichens and ice. They’re split by axe throughout the day, the thud of blade against wood marking the hours, and stacked to face what is left of the sun.' 

This description is from 'Gathering In', an autumn 2011 post on Julian Hoffman's Notes from Near and Far.  His blog has formed the basis of a book, The Small Heart of Things, on the landscape of the Prespa Lakes in northern Greece.  In 2015 it seems more likely that a Twitter feed will lead to a book deal - Penguin recently won a bidding war over the Herdwick Shepherd.  According to the Guardian, The Shepherd’s Life 'may well do for sheep what Helen Macdonald did for hawks'.  Before H is for Hawk, Helen (as Pluvialis) wrote Fretmarks, a personal blog which flew wherever it wanted - there were obviously a lot of hawk photos but also thoughtful reflections on poetry and nature writing, plus on one occasion a little appreciation of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (that's a JSBX T-shirt being worn by Plinius in the photo accompanying this blog).  Some writers have obviously been told to write blogs by their publishers but there are those who clearly do them for the love of sharing their experiences in the landscape - Melissa Harrison's Tales of the City, for example.  I often turn to Caspar Henderson's A New Map of Wonders for inspiration - today he has quoted Barry Lopez: 'the first lesson in learning how to see more deeply into a landscape was to be continuously attentive...

Julian Hoffman, photograph for 'Gathering In', 2011 

Both myself and Mrs Plinius are great admirers of the writings of Ken Worpole.  The blog he started with Jason Orton, The New English Landscape, contains short essays on some of the themes I have covered on this site.  British writing, music and film have all been covered in recent years on Landscapism, which I hope Eddie manages to keep going while he pursues his academic studies.  Similar ground has been covered by the collective blog Caught by the River, for which many of those I am talking about here have written short pieces.  Collaborative sites can be as transitory as personal ones, but this one, with its publications, social events and festival appearances, looks like it will become a long-lived and well-loved British institution.  Another excellent blog with many authors is hosted by The Wordsworth Trust.  It's focus is on Romanticism broadly, not just Wordsworth - I have a post on Robert Southey's 'The Cataract of Lodore' coming up on it soon.

Some of the earlier literary blogs posted diary entries of great authors - you can for example read what Henry David Thoreau had to say about cranberries on this day in 1853.  The John Clare Weblog started over a year before mine and reached its 1000th post sometime ago.  Each entry contains a poem or text, often linked to the changing seasons.  From November 2005 here is the first stanza of one of Clare's autumn poems which seems particularly apt in a week of such blustery weather.

I love the fitful gust that shakes
The casement all the day,
And from the glossy elm tree takes
The faded leaves away,
Twirling them by the window pane
With thousand others down the lane. 

The web is full of poetry sites (the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog has a long list of links) but one of the most visually appealing is 'Beyond the Pale', a blog by Tom Clark.  This is the American Tom Clark, not to be confused with Thomas A. Clark who also has a more infrequent blog, highlighting his art works and new publications. 'Beyond the Pale' covers a wide range of material but it does sometimes feature poems with landscape imagery; a recent post for example centred on a translation of Hsieh T'iao's 'Viewing the Three Lakes', from which these are the opening lines

Red clouds mirrored where the waters meet.
From the red terrace -- birds returning,
the encircling plains, mosaic of river isles.
Inklings of spring's luxuriance
as autumn's last yellows fade.

Last yellows, from my window today

These autumn images keep reminding me of the transitory nature of blogs which may aspire to the form of trees but are more often like leaves, sustained only for a short time.  I am sure many psychogeography and walking blogs have been started over the last ten years; among those still being maintained are the Psychogeographic Review,  Under a Grey Sky (Berlin), Urban Adventure in Rotterdam,  East of Elveden (Norfolk) and Particulations (theory).  My two favourites (both with exemplary accompanying Twitter feeds) are Lines of Landscape and The Fife Psychogeographical Collective.  The FPC now have a book based on the blog, From Hill to Sea, which I am sure is excellent.  The most recent dispatch from Fife had an Autumnal theme and included these lines from Rilke's Letters on Cézanne

'At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.'

Sadly, over all these years, I have never found any other blogs devoted to the history of landscape art.  I had hoped that the Internet's 'long tail' might have given rise to blogs devoted to the art of Cézanne or Balke or Altdorfer, to the Nanjing School or Aeropittura or early seventeenth century copper plate landscapes... perhaps they do exist and I've failed to come across them.  For garden history I always used to enjoy Gardenhistorygirl - silent since 2014 - but the Garden Visit site's blog continues and it sometimes discusses interesting historical questions (e.g. on whether Zen gardens really were 'Zen').  I like the way its latest post begins: 'hard to know what I would write if the Sunday Express asked me to do a few hundred words on garden design but I can put some helpful advice in one sentence: 'don’t take advice from Alan Titchmarsh''.

No doubt someone has already written an academic study of blogging's role in art practice.  Chris Drury has used microcosm and macrocosm to document three of his projects, but it has been dormant since 2012.  He is one of the artists whose progress I follow through Peter Foolen's blog, a reliable source of intelligence on upcoming exhibitions by people like herman de vries, Roger Ackling, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alec Finlay and the artists wrote about ten years ago today, Hamish Fulton and Richard Long. Alec Finlay's own blogspot site is probably no longer the optimal means of keeping up with his activities but, like Chris Drury, he has used blogger to chart the progress of certain projects.  Five years ago I wrote about The Road North, in which he and Ken Cockburn mapped Basho's famous journey onto the geography of Scotland.  Station 47 was their temple of Zenshoji, Stonypath, the garden created by Alec's parents.  In this post Alec quoted an autumn poem by Basho (the translation is by Cid Corman).

all that night
the autumn winds being heard
beyond the mountains

Alec Finlay, Autumn (fallen), 2010 

Music and sound art blogs have come and gone - the useful Field Reporter site for example seems to have become inactive a year ago.  It looked for a while as if Alex Ross would stop writing The Rest is Noise but he is still at it (I quoted him in a recent post about Mahler).  His latest post is about a 'mobile opera' performed out in the landscape, Hopscotch.  Some of the composers I have featured in my end-of-year landscape music surveys have kept blogs.  The Land Observations site documents the work of James Brooks which I first mentioned here in 2012.  Jez riley French has a blog for his field recordings but also another one, treasure hiding, that is more of an online notebook featuring art and photography as well as music.  Richard Skelton has one blog under his own name one for his Landings project.  The Corbel Stone Press which Richard runs with Autumn Richardson has its own elegant Wordpress blog - newest posts concern the latest edition of their journal Reliquiae.  (I will shortly be editing the first Reliquiae Digital Supplement in collaboration with flowerville, whose own blog engages with an intriguing range of writers).

There are more I should mention... hard to classify like The Art of Memory (the link I've embedded here is to posts labelled 'sea'), or at the outer limits what I cover on this site: Friends of the Pleistocene, Ecology without Nature.  Design, with its constant flow of striking images and new ideas has been an ideal subject for blogs, some of which have grown into more ambitious undertakings (two of my neighbours run an excellent site called Dezeen which often features nature-related design and landscape architecture).  I have kept links here to a few blogs that investigated landscape futures even though they are no longer being updated: Deconcrete, Landscape and Urbanism and the much-missed Pruned.  But the best of these speculative blogs, indeed the finest blog of any kind I have encountered, Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG, passed its tenth anniversary last year.  I'll end by repeating here what Geoff wrote then, thanking you 'for reading, commenting, critiquing, and following along, whoever and wherever you are.'

Yellow & Blue

A poetry reading by Thomas A. Clark is a rare and special occasion, so we took leave this week and headed up to Grasmere to hear him.  Earlier this year Carcanet published a new collection, Yellow & Blue - 'a series of small acts of attention, repeated attempts to step outside the circle of human concern and into a wider responsibility to the natural world.'  It begins in an empty landscape, as a scree slope tumbles unregarded into a green lochan, but signs of human activity soon become apparent - in a dripping rope, plastic piled up by a storm, the remnant of a net clinging to a teasel head. And whilst this book, like his earlier collections, suggests ways of being in the world and attending to rocks and water, trees and flowers, light and shadow, it does not neglect the history of the Highlands and Islands, imagining moments in the lives of those whose abandoned homes are only occupied now by the sheep.  'Bending down / by the burn / to pick fresh / water mint / did they pause / for a moment / out of the wind.'  As we listened to these poems in the comfortable book-lined reading room of the Jerwood Centre, thunder could be heard gathering outside over the darkening fells.  The storm died away, the reading came to an end and we headed off into the night.  Yellow & Blue ends in two forms of illumination... 'a lamp of fish oil / with a wick of rushes / gathered by the light / of the full moon.'

Postscript: Before the reading began we saw staff at the Jerwood setting up a new exhibition, 'Wordsworth and Basho: Walking Poets', which will feature new work by contemporary artists.  It was a pity to miss this - it starts this weekend and runs until November - but we managed one or two other things in the Lake District that I might mention here.  The photograph above is from a walk we did near Coniston Water on the morning of the reading.

The storm runs forth on several seas

Harriet Tarlo's anthology of radical landscape poetry The Ground Aslant, which I previewed in an earlier post, has now been published.  Shearsman have made the book's introduction available to download on their website, so there's no real need for me to summarise its contents.  Here instead is an unrepresentative sequence of quotations (copyright prevents the inclusion of whole poems), chosen to provide 'some landscapes' from each of the sixteen poets, starting with the editor:

Black Combe crest

       over ridges                      shale spit line
                                         pale marram dunes           (their small sea-bright
                                                                                  trefoils and succulents) ...

- from 'Outcrops at Haverrig', by Harriet Tarlo

                                    ...between loss and consolidation
                                       in the hollow of the dune slack

- from the second short poem in Thomas A. Clark's sequence 'The Grey Fold'

            

                                   ... the new salt marsh
                                       no more freshwater
                                       the salt line
                                       grey grass
                                       bleached trees
                                       byre useless ...

- from the April section of 'Myne' by Frances Presley, on a walk from Greenaleigh to Porlock Bay

                                     ... I hear mud rustle
                                     ducks come in to land
                                     tide recedes in intensity

                                     blood filled hands
                                     I mean lands
                                     the duck glides
                                     and lands

- from 'lights' by Ian Davidson, whose afterword to his collection At a Stretch worries that 'there may be too much landscape' in his poetry...

                  ...  At Kingwater the stream plashes
     kingcups over the green ironbridge, pupae to dust wedges
     and rust coloured reflections of trees in water.
     Flag irises, rhododendrons.  Out of focus pine trees, lacking their bitmap,
     alive only in geological time. ...

- from 'The Stars Have Broken in Pieces' in which Nicholas Johnson passes through the landscape of northern England, from Derbyshire to Cumbria

                       through white trees nothing said
                                     the edges grow sharper the hills
                                                     farther away with each degree

- from 'Gwydyr Forest' by Zoë Skoulding

                    ...This is a wood you increase by coming-out-of-it -
                       out into the snow with a sawing motion of it -
bear-lope        muskrat-ramble     badger-trundle            marten-amble...

- from 'Carcajou' by Colin Simms, poet and naturalist who was the subject of an earlier post here

Trees pale in knot but nowhere in cooped flux of them, not-bending swivels a sky foldlessly relenting.  Leaning skyward can't suffer on the slant, only drawn off slope by the unholdable intimacy of vertical separation.

- from 'Lean Earth Off Trees Unaslant, 3' by Peter Larkin

... a little light at dusk by which to sit and read the blanched white ash-stems reaching sky
       ward the steep woody tangle above the tumbling stream each stem gleams in the January dull ...

- from Wendy Mulford's 'Alltud: 'exile'', part of a description of the Wye valley at Erwood in Powys

                    Snow has settled in the lines
                    Of an old ridge-and-furrow system
                    Striping the gently sloping dark
                    Green fields, engrossed script
                    Of duration, repetition, authority...

- from 'Prelude' by Peter Riley

                   the feeding of one into the landscape results
                   in a climbing to infinity this opens the labour of a day
                   the task is to find a distribution of fields
                   and from these the truth of this place ...

-  the first lines of Carol Watts' Zeta Landscape, which the author has described as "lyric nature poetry put under pressure"

                      scarp    along Don's arc shall   ow hanging
                      loops of pow   er-line   pylons   dull silvery
                      frames holding   dead space live   to shock oak

                      leaves pat drips & drop   rain through fractal
                      cascades...                                           

- from 'Rurban Membrane, A Sheffield Rim, North East' by Mark Goodwin

                                       ... Eyes

                                    pull on
                    contours held in common:
                 plough through   brick, steel, steads
                       under cooling towers, the soils
              worn thin for nitrogen ...

- from 'aurals' by Tony Baker, a landscape seen on 'the journey toward Mansfield'       

                               ... seductive flowertrails
                                   penetrate the hills where we confront
                                   the ambiguity of wayposts &
                                   clouds that distil a thin
                                   gleet ...

- from 'Lady's Bedstraw (Gallium verum) / Quantocks' by Elisabeth Bletsoe, who, as reported here, I saw at the second Re-Enchantment event last year

                        The storm runs forth on several seas whose manner is
                        the hard edge of a clamber down gneiss...

- the opening words of 'Dale' by Helen Macdonald 

                                      Ripples take
                                      mackerel from
                                      con-
                                      trail
                                      imbues dew.

                                      Dew jewels more
                                      obviously ground.

                                      no shadow but
                                      wisp-
                                      errs
                                      the arc
                                      amongst crystals
                                      of
                                      ice.

- from the 'High clouds base >20,000 feet' column of a tabular poem, one of a sequence called The Speed of Clouds by Mark Dickinson

The Hundred Thousand Places

The Hundred Thousand Places was another purchase at the Small Publishers Fair.  It begins in the morning at the start of a walk, by the edge of the sea, in mist and uncertainty.  In this it reminds me of an earlier collection of Clark's poems, Distance and Proximity, published by Alec Finlay's Pocket Books, which starts with a sequence 'In Praise of Walking' ('Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least possible baggage, and discover the world...') and then a second sequence 'On Looking at the Sea.'  In this new book, the walker (addressed as "you") journeys over the Scottish landscape, evoked in simple pared-down verses through the names of plants (asphodel, milkwort, crushed water-mint), the movement of wind and water, and the passing impressions of the land's contours and colours.  Eventually the walker returns to the sea, where 'a figure is seen standing at the tide's edge', like a solitary wanderer in a Friedrich painting, who may be the artist or may be oneself.

The Guardian's review by David Wheatley refers to James Joyce and William Wordsworth and concludes: 'The Hundred Thousand Places stands at a tentative and oblique angle to the more established modes of pastoral writing. There is a beautiful moment in George Oppen's "Psalm" when he exclaims of some deer, "That they are there!", and the fact of the natural world's being there at all supersedes the need for description. There is plenty of description in these poems, but they too converge on a place of revelation whose name is simply "there".'

The sea's waves' sheaves

Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sheaves, 1970

Now showing at the V&A in London - Certain Trees: The Constructed Book, Poem and Object (an exhibition I discussed last year after it had been in Paris), which features artists engaged in a 'dialogue between the natural world and its classification and presentation through the idiom of language'. The approach is illustrated here by Ian Hamilton Finlay's poem-book, 'the SEA'S WAVES' SHEAVES' shown above, a 'small folder with 3 leaf concertina-folded card', published by the artist's Wild Hawthorn Press. Works like this and the kinetic poem below are easy to imagine in an exhibition entitled 'Certain Landscapes'. Some other Ian Hamilton Finlay pieces in Certain Trees are 'Stonechats', 'Wave', 'A Woodland Flute', 'A Butterfly Garden', 'Two Trees', 'Wildflower' and 'Landscape / Interior'.

Ian Hamilton Finlay, Canal Stripe Series 4, 1964

Writing in The Independent, Tom Lubbock has praised Certain Trees, contrasting it with the often 'vain and thoughtless' approach of the famous artists gathered together in the V&A's concurrent exhibition Blood on Paper – The Art of the Book. He writes that the Certain Trees artists 'never forget where books come from: there's natural gravitation toward the subject of wood and trees. The artists dwell wittily on their materials – on letters, typefaces, inks, paper, printing, the way books work. Steve Wheatley's Over the Hills and Far Away is a book whose leaves are cut in the shapes of dipping hills; overlapped, they become a receding valley. Thomas Clark prints the words "small grey bird of dusk" in deep blue letters, but the vowels are printed in grey, like birds in an evening sky. The five vowels, you notice, run a e i o u ... Stuart Mills' booklet The Bridle Path is Filled with Clouds has a photo of puddles, brimming with reflections. The page opens and reveals. There's a knack for making imaginative leaps from the physical world of the book to the larger universe.'

Stuart Mills, Three Swallows in the River Meadows, 1969

Thanks to Colin Sackett, whose books/poems/artworks feature in the exhibition, for alerting me to the arrival of Certain Trees at the V&A and pointing me to the Tom Lubbock article.

San José Canyon: A Quality of Dancing

I stumbled upon a little online exhibition of Thomas Joshua Cooper photographs at the Ingleby Gallery site: ‘rock, water, tree’. It covers ‘the places and subjects that have been most present in his work for the past 30 years.’ Elsewhere, in an interview with David Bellingham, Cooper talks of his early approach, choosing sites like the San José Canyon in accordance with “ongoing concerns which included how both physical and emotional aspects of place, that were highly interiorised in their physical surround and emotionally charged in the gestural conditions of their object matter (grass, rocks, leafless-branches, etc.), helped me to recognise and then picture the 'symbolic field' that was and still is important to me.” In the photographs, he was “consciously removing the traditional elements that allow for a recognition of place” so as to “intensify what is now an abstracted 'symbolic field' for visual reference and location.”

In general terms it could be said that Cooper’s photographs forestall a rapid perception of landscape so as to embroil the viewer in more complex processes of thought and feeling. In his 1992 essay, ‘Poetry and the Space Beyond’, Thomas A. Clark discusses the way a Thomas Joshua Cooper photograph operates in three stages. First we admire its scale and intensity, the 'deep blacks and velvety whites' of its surface. Secondly we penetrate to the place itself - not some famous site, just an assemblage of trees, foliage, water. Finally the viewer starts to feel the spirit of the place, which ‘will always be alien, unhuman, beyond our preconceptions.’ In this way Clark looks at the photograph ‘San José Canyon: A Quality of Dancing’ and sees not just morning light on a hillside, but an evocation of first light and first things, ‘a world cleansed of history’.

The Bridlepath is Filled with Clouds

Certain Trees was the title of an exhibition of 'the constructed book, poem and object 1964-2006' held at the Centre des livres d'artistes last year. It focused on a loosely connected group of artists and poets who have presented their own work through small presses and exhibition spaces: Simon Cutts, Stuart Mills, Brian Lane, Les Coleman, Thomas A. Clark and others. In his essay for the catalogue, John Bevis sees these artists as inhabiting the (relatively narrow) space between Robert Lax, the American minimalist poet (working in a line that runs from Emily Dickinson through William Carlos Williams and the Objectivists), and Ian Hamilton Finlay, maker of concrete poems.

It is interesting how often these artists work with landscape themes. Bevis himself is represented by works called Cloud Study (1981), The Foliage Society (1984), and An A-Z of Birdsong (1995). The catalogue describes Bevis as pursuing a 'dialogue between the natural world and its classification and presentation through the idiom of language'. This is a description that could be also applied to works by Thomas A. Clark, Ian Hamilton Finlay and other books and objects: Simon Cutts' After John Clare (2002-4), Stuart Mills' The Bridlepath is Filled with Clouds (1970), Fridjof Nansens's Fog Log (1978) by Brian Lane. Some of the names of the small presses also suggest an affinity with the natural world: Moschatel, Wild Hawthorn, Coracle.

The title 'Certain Trees', with its own hint of landscape, comes from a Roy Fisher poem 'Epitaph: Lorine Neidecker' (evoking her best known poem, 'My Friend Tree', which was published in Ian Hamilton Finlay's magazine 'Poor. Old. Tired. Horse', which was in turn named after a line in a Robert Creeley poem...) The lines by Roy Fisher are juxtaposed in the catalogue with a Simon Cutts poem from 1968, 'The Menagerie goes for a Walk': '.... shade from your tree / touch from my wood. A wood full of trees / a tree full of wood.'

Finlay, Fisher and Neidecker all feature in another exhibition, 'The possibility of poetry: from Migrant magazine to artists' books' currently on at the British Library, which celebrates Gael Turnbull's 1960s little magazine, Migrant.

Waking in the marram grass

The photograph here shows some silver marram grass we saw on the island of Bryher a couple of summers ago. It was swaying invitingly and reminded me of Thomas A. Clark’s short poem on falling asleep in marram grass, a poem that can be seen on his website. As the Scottish poetry library site’s page on him explains, Clark runs the Cairn gallery which has recently re-located to Pittenweem. I have not visited the new version, but the earlier gallery in Nailsworth was a special place with the feeling of a sanctuary: above an old post office, quiet, white rooms hung with minimalist art works and, here and there, small poetic inscriptions. We last went there in 2002 when there was an exhibition that made a connection between Novalis and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s book The Blue Sail. In the midst of Finlay’s poems this book includes Novalis’s statement on the importance of romanticising the everyday. The title of the anthology also recalls Novalis’s symbol of the blue flower.