How simple things are complex really

I was entranced this month by Vija Celmins’ work on show in Gracefield Arts Centre.  Small greyish frames of sketchy dark, lit by stars and cobwebs, mostly.  It’s part of the Artist Rooms On Tour exhibition that is showing around Britain this summer, and I think it’s great that Gracefield has succeeded in bringing it to Dumfries. 
I walked slowly round the exhibition, trying to tune in to what the artist was doing.  There is much repetition of subject.  Or a sense of someone trying afresh, afresh, to catch something there.  It feels quite meditative, all that near-focus on cobwebs.  They are extraordinarily beautiful and have the imperfections of a torn thread caused by a passing sleeve; or a rent where a fly was captured.  They have just the right torsion and drag on their connecting threads, whose anchors are just off the paper, but you feel that they too would be everyday and recognisable.  Celmins takes the everyday, and makes us see it with wonder.  Well that’s art, for me.

I started off by thinking the stars were curiously ‘similar’ to the webs.  And in certain ways they are.  But the webs are close up.  And the stars are infinitely distant.  They are still familiar to us, but in all ways they are truly stranger. 
I am impressed by Celmins’ dedication, almost a vocation, to her subjects.  You really have the impression of a mind at work, really working, sticking at it, doggedly, inventively.  Then there are the starscapes set beside tumbling aeroplanes, and my  mood darkened.  This work says so much, without seeming to. 

My favourite piece is 'Constellation – Uccello 1983' which brings together Celmins' own image of the night sky and a found image of a drawing by the Renaissance master Paolo Uccello. While Uccello’s  drawing of a chalice explores the representation of three-dimensional space on the flat page, Celmins' own image explores a different way to render space.  I sat down among the drawings and thought about the shape of space, and what we think we see as we look back millions of years into the past.  Webs, waves, stars, sand - Celmins is inspirational.

Getting ever so 21st century

Ravenglass Poetry Press have just arranged for 'The Treeless Region' to appear as an e-book.  If I had a Kindle, I could read it on it.  This is simultaneously very nice, and quite strange. 
It's probably a good thing, because of course if you write, you hope someone else will read, and perhaps new platforms for reading will just increase readership, and even opportunities for reading.  I like to think of executives skiving into poetry during long meetings. 

Here it is, anyway.  http://www.amazon.co.uk/THE-TREELESS-REGION-ebook/dp/B004ZULP6Y/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=A3TVV12T0I6NSM

Sheepwalks

At the launch of Southlight 8 recently, I met Kate Foster, a Borders artist.  Southlight 8 (poetry, prose, literary interview and illustration, published in Dumfries & Galloway http://www.dgarts.co.uk/349/literature/southlight/) contains a double page spread of Kate's work.  What with all the lambs hopping around at home, I'm drawn back to take another look at Kate's work.

I find it both delicate and hard.  The soft shades of her pastel drawings are certainly reminicent of wool, but also of mud, and the grey and green landscape.  Her lines are lean, and there's an awareness of skeleton, the boniness of a sheep's face.
She's exploring the many ways sheep make marks on the landscape.  They make their own landuse, in a mirror of our own.  They follow contours, favour certain slopes, sleep at the foot of particular dykes.  I notice ours move around according to time of day.  This is a very predictable pattern, but they vary it to take shelter from bad weather. The routines and the paths are learnt by the lambs at their mothers' tails, and passed on along the generations.
Find Kate Foster's work at http://inthepresenttense.net/, I recommend it.

New lambs, apple blossom and a general feeling of growth

Walking down to the field early on Saturday morning, I knew something was up.  Diamond, Dodd and Pearl hurried towards me, eager for what I bring in the bucket.  Ruby turned on her haunches, her head bent down, and I could just see a slim black shape close by her in the shadow of the dyke.  Then a second one as she moved them smartly off and away from me. 

Dougie brought the nasty gooey bottle of iodine, with which we swab newborns' umbilical cords.  While the other sheep searched for every last beet pulp nut in the trough, I casually sidled towards the lambs.  Ruby, wits honed by new motherhood, gathered them up and set off at a fast walk.  Grasping the iodine I'd just got the other hand on the curly back of the slower lamb, when it let out a horrified bleat and sprang to mother.  I missed.  We caught up with them later when all three were sleeping, and managed to catch one.  Once you've got one, you've got both, as the mother and second lamb mill anxiously around the first, which is wailing in panic in your hands.  Your hands are in no time striped bright yellow with iodine.
We have a biggish tup lamb and a smaller ewe lamb.  Both look fit and healthy, feeding well from Ruby's always abundant supply.  Doug suggested that as they were in all probability born the night before, they could be Kate and William.  However, even in a republican household, it was felt this was a spot callous: as cute as these lambs are now, their long-term future is er, quite short.  But jolly - no travelling, grow up with mum, auntie, and some cousins, plenty to eat and kindly treatment. 

Diamond and Pearl are now also very heavy on their feet, and should soon be lambing too.  Dodd is a wether, a pet lamb from 2 years ago.  He toils not, neither does he spin.  All he does is canter up to me to have his face stroked and his ears rubbed.  I don't feed him titbits in case he starts pushing people.  He stands close beside, eyes faraway, regressing to lambhood while I scratch under his ears. He is rather charming.

The apple blossom this year is amazing.  No rain to turn it brown, and - just and so - no frost to blacken it.  Look.

Hill  Lambs

This week the hill lambs are being born,

 licked dry in blowy glens.

 

They raise skinny rumps and totter,

cry thin as peewits. This morning

I found new twins nested below a dyke, just as,

an hour ago, they slept in warm red dark.

Knitted onto tiny frames their 
thick-whorled, black wool coats
are a perfect fit.

I'm thrilled to relate that 'Lost At Sea' has been shortlisted for the Callum MacDonald Memorial Award, http://www.nls.uk/news/press/2011/04/callum-macdonald-competition-shortlist .  I feel I'm in tremendous company, and am much looking forward to the big night on 19 May, when all will be revealed. (But I think Anna Crowe should win! See below, I am a fan.)

And I'd not got over this before Hugh Bryden was on the phone again to announce that Roncadora Press has been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publisher's Award.  I am very proud to say that 'Lost At Sea' was part of his submission.  Hope Hugh wins, he deserves it.  I've not forgotten seeing his studio and his house stacked high with half-built pamphlets, which he equably stitches and glues away at with astonishing speed and deftness.  http://www.bl.uk/poetrypamphlets/publishers.html

Figure in a Landscape by Anna Crowe

Mariscat’s simple, restrained production of Anna Crowe’s pamphlet is appropriate to this short collection of poems inspired by ‘Paisatge amb figueres’ (Landscape with fig trees), by Catalan sculptor Andreu Maimo.http://www.mariscatpress.co.uk/MariscatPress/Mariscat.html As it came out of the envelope I was immediately entranced by the rich dull ochre of the cover and the secretive density of Maimo’s drawing of fig leaves on the cover.

The poems are just as much a treat.  Anna Crowe has written in memory of her sister, but Maimo’s art provides the meditative focus for the poems.  I love the way both poet and artist  circle around and around the same theme, revisiting and re-examining.  The poems are deeply thought-about, and moving.  They often have an intense sadness and regret, but their exactness keeps them from any tilt towards sentimentality:

‘Thursdays were jours de conge
for girls of the Cour Bastide
so we hid among the branches
to watch the kids of the ecole communale
At break the boys would chase
long lines of girls
their screams of joy
(we knew we must never scream)
a froth of petticoats
that broke like surf
on our silent wall’ 

With ease the poems evoke landscape, climate and places of Mallorca and Marseille:

‘Fig trees in front of Can Cabana
their green skirts making tents of shade
in a field of shimmering wheat’

Explorations of childhood memory are set against the poet’s voice now, resonant with intelligence and resilience.  Wisdom, in fact.

Anna’s poem ‘Doves, fig tree and walls’ was chosen by Jen Hadfield as one of the ‘Best Scottish Poems 2010’.  Hurray, well deserved.  Here it is, complete.  What a fabulous last stanza: the sense of what’s gone still travelling, full of hope, not knowing its fate,

'High walls, mute, shuttered windows:
La Cour Bastide
In the shady yard at break
in the hubbub of strange language
others chalked the grid of la marelle
numbered the spaces 1, 2, 3
then halfway L'ENFER
then 4, 5, 6 to the dome at the end LE CIEL
Aiming the stone
we ventured our small attempts with
un…deux…cinq…six…
awkward as geese on bumpy ground
we tried not to land in hell
Throw by throw
words, whole phrases
crept from between the lines
trembled like lizards in the cracks of walls
then flew like the stone from our throats
Sometimes our words drew smiles
as kind as the fig tree
in the box-hedged garden
of Madame la Directrice
–A toi le tour! –A moi? –Oui, oui
Lance ta pierre! Vas-y!
 

But now you have thrown your stone
far beyond these walls
and I imagine it flying
like one of Andreu's doves
into that blue

Places & Poetry Postcards - my free workshop for children at RSPB Mersehead

I'm running a free workshop for children as part of Dumfries & Galloway Wildlife Festival.  It's called Places & Poetry Postcards, and it's at RSPB Mersehead on Friday 15 April.  Meet at 10am.  We'll go outside first for inspiration and exploration, then come in to draft, edit and generally write some poems onto Poetry Postcards, hand-stamped and decorated to take away with you. Ring me on 07504 649 150 to book.