The Fire Crane by The Fire Crane

The

Essays Poetry Interviews Fiction

Fire Crane

F REE

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issue

September 2012

Crossing the eyes and dotting the tease â&#x20AC;&#x201C; new writing from Cumbria

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The

Cover photograph

Solway, by Ian Hill

w e l c o m e

A free publication, The Fire Crane will be distributed to galleries, libraries, and other cultural venues in Cumbria and perhaps to a few beyond. It will also be available at events. If you’re reading this and know of somewhere that would be happy to take a few copies, please contact us and we’ll send some out to you. The theme for this fi rst issue was inspired by

You’ll find poems about Old Master paintings

C-Art (see www.c-art.co.uk), the annual visual

and a poetic cogitation brought on by a

arts festival in which artists all over the county

graffitied obscenity. You’ll find a poet and a

organise exhibitions, events and workshops and

painter walking through a shared landscape, not

open their studios to visitors. We asked writers

collaborating as such but working within hailing

in Cumbria to submit work that was about the

distance of each other and sometimes crossing

visual arts in some way – writing in response

paths. There are poems about photographs and

to specific art- or craftworks, for example, or

photographs about poems, and a very short

essays about particular artists. We also hoped

story about bullying inspired by a sculpture of

for collaborations between writers and artists.

a reindeer.

The response we received was tremendous and

Future issues may or not be themed, but it’s

we hope you enjoy the results. Although united

an interesting approach and we’re open to

Fire Crane An occasional showcase for the best new writing from Cumbria

by a theme, the writing is greatly varied in form, suggestions from readers and writers. The call style, and angle. Our invitation to interpret ‘the

for submissions for issue #02 will be made

visual arts’ freely was enthusiastically taken up.

via the New Writing Cumbria website and Facebook page – details below.

About NEW WRITING CUMBRIA The Fire Crane is published by New Writing Cumbria, a county-wide literature development project hosted by Eden Arts and funded by the Northern Rock Foundation. It supports and promotes contemporary writers and connects them with each other, and with readers, in Cumbria and beyond. In print and online, on the page and on the stage, writing in Cumbria is thriving and diverse. New Writing Cumbria is at the centre of a network that includes professional and voluntary arts organisations, small publishers, independent bookshops, book groups, libraries, festival and event promoters, writers’ groups, and individual writers working in many different forms and genres, from beginners to established practitioners.

editor:

Mick North

design: Jeremy Fisher, processcreative.co.uk, 01228 539536 printed By: The Newspaper Club, www.newspaperclub.com NEW WRITING CUMBRIA

April Cottage, Faugh, Heads Nook, Brampton, Cumbria CA8 9EA 01228 670076 enquiries@newwritingcumbria.org.uk www.newwritingcumbria.org.uk EDEN ARTS

For more information, visit www.newwritingcumbria.org.uk and sign up for our e-newsletter, or find us on Facebook.

WRITING CUmBria

1 Sandgate, Penrith, Cumbria CA11 7TP 01768 899444 enquiries@edenarts.co.uk www.edenarts.co.uk

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issue

c o n t e n t s

editorial

f o r s ta r t e r s Mick North

poem

M useu m for M yse l f Jeremy Over

essay

H o n e s t ly G o b s m ac k e d Jeremy Over on The Boyle Family

Interview

Th r o u gh a l e n s , da r k ly Jonathan Ruppin & Christopher Burns

Poems & photographs

Out of Time Mary Robinson & Horatio Lawson

short story

s u rv i vo r Christine Howe

Poems & paintings

Earth Journey Josephine Dickinson & Lionel Playford

Essay

W e at h e r e y e Ian Hill

Poems

h u n t e r s Pauline Yarwood, i n t e r i o r l a n d s c a p e s Martyn Halsall, h a r e Jennifer Copley, t h e h u n t Jennifer Copley

Poem

t h e l i t t l e g i r l at t h e d o o r John Rice

Poem

I n t h e a b s e n c e o f ow l s Mark Carson

Poem

Line Terry Jones

Poem

J a n e a n d Ta n n e r Terry Jones

Poem

Drab Pamela Coren 3

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f o r

s ta r t e r s

A long time ago – 1980 might be about right – I stole a tiny piece of a Robert Rauschenberg. The work – I can’t recall its title – was a typical Rauschenberg smörgåsbord of paint, collage, and real objects. There was, maybe, a table fork, but I didn’t steal that. All I took was a scrap of paper that had lifted a tad from the surface, inviting the viewer to either stick it down again or peel it off. I’m horrified that I can’t remember where this took place. Till now, I was convinced it was in what used to be the lovely old Scottish Gallery of Modern Art at Inverleith House, in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden, but a trawl of the National Galleries Scotland website finds no Rauschenbergs in its stores. Either this was a touring exhibition, or my transgression took place elsewhere. This failure of memory, and the fact that I have no idea what became of the fragment, bothers me much more than any residual guilt over an impulsive act of youthful daftness. I feel no guilt because this was a form of tribute, however ill conceived.

s an art student, I had fallen in love with

I dropped out of art school because I lost my way

Robert Creely’s collaborations with visual artists. “Joel

as a maker of objects and images and fancied my

Oppenheimer was a student, and he knew something

gap between art and life”, a place where the distinction

chances as a writer, but I was still in thrall enough to

about printing; and Rauschenberg made a drawing

between art objects and everyday objects, between art

Rauschenberg to believe that words were the ultimate,

for a poem of Joel’s. It was the first time anything of

and reality, could be challenged and, if not eradicated

infinite everyday medium, as throw-away and abundant

Rauschenberg’s had ever been published.”

completely, at least be re-arranged. I once read – and

as any junk artist could desire. Words are everywhere

again, memory fails me as to where – that early in

and they cost nothing to use, unless you don’t read

This was ‘The Dancer’, the second title from

their careers, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were

the small print or say something you shouldn’t. On

Williams’ (eventually) iconic small press, The Jargon

hawking their stuff around New York dealers, driving

reflection, I sometimes regret that I felt compelled to

Society. Some Cumbrian readers might remember

a battered old van. Johns was anxious that his work

choose one or the other. I would stop being a visual

Jonathan Williams. From 1969 until his death in 2008,

might be damaged in transit, but Rauschenberg was

artist, and commit to becoming a writer. I couldn’t do

he spent his summers at a house called Corn Close in

relaxed. Just another day in the life of the paintings, he

both. Perhaps it would have been different if I had been

Dentdale, having chosen the place at Basil Bunting’s

said, or something like that, meaning that a few scuffs

in an environment like the short-lived but influential

suggestion. I could do worse, much worse, than claim

or scratches, or bits dropping off, were all part of the

Black Mountain College in North Carolina, rather than

Williams’ ghost as the guiding spirit of this first issue of

process of art; that the work wasn’t finished when it left

Wolverhampton Polytechnic’s Fine Art department.

The Fire Crane. Poet, publisher, essayist, photographer,

Rauschenberg’s notion of working “in the

hill walker, bon viveur, cultural activist and conduit,

the studio, that its life continued independently of the artist.

Rauschenberg attended Black Mountain in the

he was a keeper of the democratic aesthetic of Black

late 1940s. The college was a radical experiment

Mountain well beyond its closure in 1957, and would

in interdisciplinary arts education, in which the

have heartily endorsed Robert Creely’s observation on

read poet Jeremy Over’s piece about the Boyle Family

visual, literary and performing arts were taught and

the meeting of the verbal and visual arts: “It’s not a

(p6). Over identifies Mark Boyle’s heady 1960s mash of

experienced cheek by jowl. As a result of his encounters

question of understanding the paintings but of picking

junk assemblages, rock ‘n’ roll light shows and wacky

there, he developed working relationships with the

up their vibes - more like playing in a band.”

‘happenings’ as “a fairly good humoured exploration of

dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham and the

the narrowing gap at that time between art and life.”

composer John Cage, laying the base for many future

When Boyle discovered his true artistic groove – the

collaborations.

These Rauschenberg stories came to mind when I

printmakers, you sculptors and photographers, I could say: it’s not a question of understanding the poems; just

meticulous re-creation of randomly chosen squares of the Earth’s surface, using epoxy resin, fibreglass, and

Rauschenberg left Black Mountain before its

real materials from each site – he surely had an ear to

famous school of poets – Olson, Creely, Dorn et al -

Rauschenberg’s contention that “a painting is more like

came to prominence in the early fifties, but nevertheless

the real world if it’s made out of the real world.”

worked with two of them, Jonathan Williams and Joel Oppenheimer. “There was a small-job press in the print studio [at Black Mountain],” recalled Williams over forty years later, in a Wall Street Journal article about

It’s a fine analogy, and to all you painters and

pick up your pencils and brushes, scratch that wax, hit the chisel or the shutter button, and play.

Mick North, editor

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Getting up, going out and talking to people are all part of it one thing stuck to another from left to right à nos victimes civiles et militaires I will trawl around the toyshop Typography

with the wrestlers thoughts are things as a little boy holding an image of himself as a man as much as a brush is bread

poultry

Ave Maria

a display of hats plays a crucial role a sort of safety valve Gayton Vicarage, Sony Liston, hernia belts, student songbooks and dog food

Myself

acquired 1967

The extraordinary talents and generosity of Peter Blake bits of wire and allusions to reproduction for Oxfam a miracle visible in the work of the infinite kinds of salami, an obituary cushion, the parents’ bedroom, Dumdie Doodles, the dissecting table and the umbrella Tuesday introduced by fireworks so deftly that the join is invisible

a tennis ball

painted to represent Ely Cathedral or Dorothy

for Peter Blake

On the Balcony, Peter Blake. © Tate, London 2012. by Jeremy Over

Museum

for

or a privet hedge questioning children about, on the subject of, and approximately Eduardo Paolozzi shaped like a battleship every corner a great joy

So far so good Everything is coming to an ordered conclusion Knowledge was accumulated with care and difficulty to this end

No, I don’t think so. No, not any more. No. Not really. It was. It could have been. But I don’t know. It depends. Maybe in the past few years. Partly. In a way, yes. Quite a bit. I think so. Yes, Yes. I do, Yes. Oh Yes. Yes both.

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Honestly gobsmacked

Jeremy Over on the art of the Boyle Family

horeau

would probably have approved of the

Boyle Family, whose love for the crust of the

method that could have been devised by Raymond

earth and insatiable appetite for making art

Roussel or Glen Baxter. Various people were invited

about it has continued for over forty years.

“You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake. You must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand-heap. You must have so good an appetite as this, else you will live in vain.” H e n r y D a v i d Th o r e a u

The sites for these works were chosen using a bizarre

to the ICA, where they were blindfolded and asked to shoot 1,000 darts at a 13’x13’ map of the world. The

The project began on a west London demolition

Boyles committed to visiting each of the places that

site where Mark Boyle and his partner Joan Hills

the darts had landed on to make an artwork. In their

came across a discarded TV frame. The accidental

process of site selection, increasingly large-scale maps

‘composition’ within it, of various bits of building

are used until the sites are of a suitably small size.

rubble, seemed beautiful to them. They tried several

When the family arrives at the site, one of them throws

times to reproduce the effect themselves by deliberately

a right angle up in the air. Where it lands determines

moving the frame and choosing the contents of their

the rectangle of the earth which is to be recreated in

own compositions. But it was only when they re-

painstaking detail. The precise recipe for the mixture

introduced the original element of randomness by simply

of media and methods used to do this is still a closely

throwing the frame up in the air and seeing where it

guarded family secret but essentially it seems to involve

landed that they liked what they saw again.

part collage of some debris from the site - dust, sand, the odd twig - and part-creation of a painted fibreglass

From that point onwards the two artists dedicated

relief.

themselves to reproducing incredibly realistic facsimiles of randomly chosen portions of the surface of the earth.

The mission to visit all 1,000 sites has some significant

Thirty years ago their children, Sebastian and Georgia,

obstacles in its way. The length of the process at current

joined in this venture. Ever since, and even since

rates means that finishing just the land-based part of

the death of Mark Boyle in 2005, they have worked

the venture will take several generations which, as

collaboratively under the name ‘Boyle Family’.

there’s no news of further Boyles beyond Sebastian and Georgia, is a bit worrying. The project is in safe hands

The roots of the Boyles’ art lie in the sixties performance

for the present though. In 2001, a BBC Scotland film

art and music scene, as evidenced by their early junk

chronicled a trip the family made to the Scottish Island

assemblages and gloopy lava lamp light shows for Jimi

of Barra to try and make one of their works. Stoical

Hendrix and Soft Machine (the first of their kind).

and determined, if a bit joyless in the wind and drizzle,

There were also ‘Happenings’ such as ‘In Memory

it all seemed a rather typically British family seaside

of Big Ed’, which featured a staged interruption of a

affair right down to the preoccupation with what was

conference on the Theatre of the Absurd by a bagpiper

underfoot on the beach. Both daughter and father hinted

and a naked woman wheeled around in a shopping

at what they might have missed out on, as individuals

trolley. And then there’s ‘Graziella Martinez, the avant-

and as a family, because of the obsessive nature of their

garde dancer, performing on a tricycle with a growing

art, but ultimately there is no real questioning of what

projected scribble drawing’. This was all a fairly good

they are here on this earth to do, which, according to

humoured exploration of the narrowing gap at that time

Mark Boyle, is “to see without motive and without

between art and life, performer and audience (as well

reminiscence this cliff, this street, this roof, this field,

as a testament to what those audiences were prepared

this rock, this earth.”

to put up with), but it does seem a bit of a sideshow to the Boyles’ main work, which since 1969 has been the

No mention there of water, and the Boyles still haven’t

‘World Series’ of earth presentations.

conquered the technical difficulties of reproducing the surface of the sea where two thirds of those random darts landed, except through the medium of HD video, as demonstrated by the blu-ray installation produced as part of the Barra Project.

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Rock and Scree, Mark Boyle. © Tate, London 2012.

The elaborate lengths the Boyles go to, to try and ensure

I think the real reason why the Boyles’ work is so

I don’t know and the Boyles, like genuine magicians,

the randomness of the selection of sites for their works

successful, why people stand and gawp at these works in

aren’t telling. And I’m grateful to them for that. Because

and the superrealism of the fi nished objects, are attempts

wonder, lies in their technical sophistication. They’re not

the artifice and the secrecy are vital I think. They’re

to remove all human traces of subjectivity, conditioning

just lumps of reality but masterpieces of trompe l’oeil.

what cause the curiosity, the staring in disbelief, the

and aesthetic prejudice; to see the world as if for the

I was suspicious of this at fi rst. If the point is simply to

sniffi ng and the surreptitious prod (also frequently

fi rst time and then to present it to us for our similarly

present the earth to the viewer why not just photograph

confessed to in the visitors’ book). Perhaps this is

“motiveless appraisal”. This phrase may sound rather

it, or actually bring the thing itself into the gallery and

closer to ‘suspicious’ than ‘motiveless’ appraisal but

dry but the Boyles are passionate about it – religious

be done with it? Why go to these extraordinary and

the end result seems to be wonder, whichever route you

even. It reminds me of Krishnamurti’s description of

secretive lengths to make an artificial duplicate of the

take. George Perec, in his essay ‘Approaches to What’,

meditation as the “choiceless awareness” of reality.

thing?

recommends something like this investigative approach to what he called the infra-ordinary – that which usually

Seeing the world with an ‘innocent’ eye is itself a

At their Edinburgh exhibition at the Scottish National

myth, of course, and the Boyles know this. They’re not

Gallery of Modern Art in 2003, I was a bit embarrassed

pursuing the kind of experiences Alice has in the wood

to fi nd myself falling, along with all the others, to

in Through the Looking Glass, where things have no

writing ‘How do they do it?’ in the comments book, for

names. But they do seem to be making a strong case for

what I felt was the work’s superficial ‘Madame Tussauds’

seeing, if not with innocent eyes, wider eyes at least.

appeal. But I found that appeal lasting long after I’d

And for being more frequently and honestly gobsmacked

fi nished staring at the last work in the exhibition, a

before the world.

flawless square of grass meadow (Grass Study, 2003) which seemed to pull everyone magnetically in to a

It is a recurring aim of art, I suppose, to defamiliarize,

distance of about six inches to inspect it.

to present the strange and extraordinary in the ordinary. The particular way in which the Boyles set about

It lasted well after I’d left the gallery, spilling over

achieving this is by fi nding something, taking it out of

into my walk back to the station along the freshly-

its original context and re-framing it within the gallery;

made-grubby pavements of Edinburgh, past the little

also by carrying out a shift in planes from the horizontal

black splats of chewing gum, the golden yellow lines

earth to the vertical gallery wall. In the case of Concrete

and sudden manhole covers, the carefully arranged

Steps Study, in which steps are displayed flat against

leaves, cigarette butts and litter with suggestions such

the wall like a sheet of corrugated iron, the effect of this

as ‘eat, relax, linger’. I found myself still looking and

shift is vertiginous. On the whole, though, this sort of

wondering, ‘How do they do it?’.

goes without saying or seeing:

“What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.”

de-familiarization is pretty familiar to us now. We are all becoming used to the idea of ‘found’ objects in the gallery - urinals, sharks, unmade beds, light switches … But this isn’t just found art.

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Through a lens, darkly Christopher Burns

i n t e rv i e w e d

Amanda Jayne

by Jonathan Ruppin

n the opening chapter of Cumbrian novelist Christopher Burns’s latest novel, A Division of the Light, a

photographer impulsively takes pictures of a bag-snatch before going to the aid of the victim, Alice Fell. As a man who has taken portraits of many women, he finds something irresistible about her and becomes driven by a desire to bring her to his studio. Although Gregory Pharoah has seduced many of his subjects before, assisted by his ability to bring out something unique in all he photographs, the astute Alice is more wary of his motives.

In this interview by Jonathan Ruppin, originally published on the Foyles Bookshop website, Christopher talks about why Alice is such an appealing subject for Gregory, how the photograph used for the cover of a novel about photography was chosen, and about our changing relationship with photography in the digital age.

“ It is not the crime that excites the

photographer’s attention, but a chance configuration of shape and texture – the smooth opacity of the lenses, the knotty tension in the victim’s hands, the summer clothing rubbed along the ground. These, and the dishevelled hair that screens a face he cannot quite see and that could so easily have smashed into the pavement.

”

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For a novel about a visual medium, the choice of image for the cover must have required a fair amount of thought. Can you tell us anything about the photograph that’s been chosen?

Gregory has gone on to sleep with many of his photographic subjects. Would you say his success with women is down more to his ability to flatter with the camera or his personal charisma?

Does the tension in the relationship between Gregory and his daughter, Cassie, stem from the intrusive photographs of his wife’s/her mother’s death or is there something deeper to it?

The striking and memorable cover portrait was chosen because it has resonance not only with the physical appearance of one of the characters, but also with a mysterious event in the narrative. A design team working for the publisher discovered the image. As soon as its use was suggested, the woman with the dark flowing hair was an obvious choice for the cover.

Both personal charm and compositional talent form the beginnings of these relationships. Both photographer and model want the best results, and in their own way each flatters and guides the other. Eventually they find themselves following a predictable course of events. It’s a kind of dance, with mutually understood progressions and a foreseeable end point. Of course Gregory considers himself an expert, not only in his profession, but also in the art of seduction. Perhaps the other women in his life think of themselves with similar confidence.

There is something deeper to it. Although it may appear unconventional, there is something of a traditional father-daughter relationship between Gregory and Cassie. As readers will discover, in this case the daughter is often wiser than the father. However Gregory’s behaviour as Cassie’s mother was dying can never be forgotten by either of them.

It seems that Gregory is more taken by Alice than most of his previous subjects. Is that because she remains too mysterious to him, leaving Gregory unable to strip her bare with the gaze of the camera?

Gregory understands that the invention of photography led to a revolution in human consciousness. The print gave us the opportunity to gaze at people we would never meet and countries we would never visit, just as it gave us the ability to stare on the nakedness of strangers and the faces of those who died before we were born. These new insights could be consoling, enlightening, troubling, or frightening. Early portraits were treasured not only because they were expensive, but also because they were taken infrequently - often only once. And what the viewer saw was the truth, or what was believed to be the truth.

Is Gregory modelled after a specific photographer?

Not as such, although he shares characteristics with many of those who work in the profession. Gregory’s ambition is to be compared to classic photographers who have taken iconic studies that have informed our appreciation of the human face and the human body. The book opens with Gregory instinctively taking pictures of Alice as she has her bag snatched. Does his talent for photography rely on his ability to view his subject dispassionately? Objectivity is necessary for any photographic study, but it is also true that a degree of involvement will enhance the result. At first Gregory does not know Alice, so it is only the dynamic of her fall, and the textures and contrasts that his lens can capture, which intrigue him professionally. Later, when he meets her again, the balance between his objectivity and involvement is to become complex, unpredictable, and emotionally charged.

Gregory believes that there is much of himself in his pictures. Would you say the same is true for your writing? I am not an author who uses his own sensibility as a vehicle for fiction. Instead I try to create characters with their own personalities so that their individual beliefs, backgrounds, and actions govern the narrative. Until these characters begin to define themselves, I have little idea of what shape a novel will take. So that although there must surely be hints of my own personality and experience in a text, I do not believe that these are readily detectable. Of course this does not mean that my fiction is not without its own distinguishing themes, imagery and patterns. Critics could argue that these are somehow indicative of a writer’s personality, but I would take issue with such an interpretation.

Alice does not obey the rules of the dance. She and Gregory have different outlooks and different aims. She is obstructive, enigmatic, not conventionally beautiful, and from the start she refuses to collaborate with his plans. To Gregory, Alice becomes a challenge. And yet he continues to believe that eventually he will be able to pin down her personality with his lens. Alice has other ideas.

“Gregory obtains both aesthetic and intellectual satisfaction from photography.” [p.72] Do you find that you take the same pleasures from writing as he does from photography? Photography and writing are different disciplines and their practitioners must exercise very different means of selection, application, and control. A blank sheet of paper has more potential and is more unsettling than a camera with nothing to focus on. A photograph can be framed, shot and assessed within seconds, and it usually stands on its own. A novel will often take two or three years to write, will have several false starts, and by its very nature is comprised of hundreds of interconnecting components. And it may be a very long time before its value is recognised. Take one photograph from a sequence and print it on its own and it will still be a powerful image: take several pages from a novel and publish them separately and they will be pale ghosts of a greater whole. So although we may discuss each art (or craft) using similar categories, their intellectual, aesthetic, and other qualities must be very different, and satisfactions and frustrations of their creation must be different, too.

Do you think the ease of digital photo manipulation and ubiquity of cameras today has changed our relationship with the photographic image?

Nowadays anyone with a camera or phone can take hundreds of images and not be concerned about expense, or framing, or image quality. We are still too close to this new revolution to fully understand its social or psychological effects. What does seem certain is that photography, although increasingly democratised, is shedding its traditional qualities of permanence and display. Instead its images are becoming both easily transferable and disposable. Characters in A Division of the Light may operate with the new technology, but they also recognise that photography has always been associated with a kind of continuity. They understand, too, that the image has given new perspectives on truth, beauty, exploitation, and death. Which are some of the broader themes of the novel as a whole.

A Division of the Light is published by Quercus. For more author interviews courtesy of Foyles Bookshop, visit their website at www.foyles.co.uk

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Out of time Five poems and photographs selected from a collaboration between poet Mary Robinson and photographer Horatio Lawson. Mary Robinson writes:

An absence of trains It’s luck – those two people passing through, breaking their journey on a trip they’ll never make again. You’re bored and, like the seated stranger, you too have missed the train. Your eye weighs up the possibilities. The station reconstructs itself in classic thirds – rails, platform, concrete cladding, and in the picture’s centre the row of seats, and the third person face turned towards the wall. As two lamp posts reassemble as altar candles the station becomes a sanctuary in the lull between trains.

Horatio was a contemporary

The first set made me realise

at Edinburgh College of

how much I respond to the

Art with my son David. The

visual when writing. In the

project got off the ground

second set I didn’t want to

during a winter evening

be prescriptive as to subject

round the fire sharing a

matter so concentrated more

bottle of Jura malt whisky

on photographic techniques.

(not the whole bottle!).

Fairly early on I decided

Perhaps this is how all the

to write the poems in the

best projects start. Out of a

second person, addressing

large batch of photographs

the photographer.

Your lens does not speak of the past or the future, only the silence of the shadowless present, the moment out of time of one who waits and the moment in the breaking journey when two people are between departure and destination.

we selected a few for me to write poems. Then Horatio said that it would be interesting to take photographs in response to some of my poems.

Wall What do you see as you lean against the stones? The light running at full tilt, turning the rushes gold, storm clouds jostling for peak position and the mountain’s darkening veil.

You are not fooled by the wall that takes us in. You remember your home, your town, the familiar greetings in the street, absurd here as a tea pavilion in the wilderness.

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Movement

Zoom

Old photographs capture movement or rather the place where movement once was – the ghostly blur of a wriggling child, the distracted dog smudged by a distant sound.

Cast your lens out into the distance

Movement is life’s alibi when the camera arrests a memory: the shutter’s uncertainty principle.

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keep the focus steady haul in the image, playing the light, wait until you are sure before you land it.

Backlit Conjure the dark’s silhouette at noon, halo those details I never noticed. Control the spell of light, make it malleable, turn it, mould it until it is crystal clear. Fold back the day, roll the sun widdershins, contre jour.

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It wasn’t a happy reindeer, she was sure of that.

Survivor by cHriStine Howe

Someone might be looking for her. She

It was no Prancer or Dancer, no Rudolph. The

supposed she’d better go back. But then she’d have

reindeer’s head was down, turned to one side, as

to face them, and the teachers. Reindeers didn’t

if it might be looking for something. She swivelled

have such problems, but she supposed they had

on the bench to look at the reindeer from another

their own, like finding enough to eat. She stood

angle. It looked tired too, she thought.

up and approached the reindeer, wondering how

She yawned and glanced at her watch. She’d been sat on the gallery bench for ten minutes in the reindeer’s company. Her stomach rumbled. That was it! The reindeer was hungry and it was looking for food. The tundra; hadn’t they done that in geography, when she was still paying attention, before the trouble started? Huge distances the reindeer travelled across the tundra. Didn’t they eat lichens? She’d made herself a cheese and tomato roll to take to school that day, but they’d tipped her bag out on the ground, found her lunch and stamped on it, laughing. That’s when she’d run out of school.

it had been made. It was tempting to touch it, but she knew that was off limits. Probably a camera watching her. No one else had come into that room of the gallery; she had the reindeer to herself. If its head were lifted up it would look proud. Instead it seemed to be looking at her scuffed trainers. She went back to the bench, pulled a tissue from her pocket and rubbed at them. She rubbed at her bag too; it was dirty on one side from when they had thrown it on the ground. It was cold, but not as cold as outside. She pulled her thin jacket closer. The air in the gallery wasn’t like anywhere else. School smelled and so did home, and so did outside, but the gallery just had a dry, plain sort of smell. She wondered how the tundra smelled; it would be cold and fresh and blowy. She’d want to take deep breaths there and the breaths would make her feel clean. She got up again and stood by the reindeer. It did look strong, even though it might be hungry or ill. It wasn’t right for it to be on its own, but then they couldn’t put a herd of reindeer in the gallery. Life’s not great but he’s getting on with it, she thought. The reindeer was her mate now and nobody knew. They would never know. The group were hung around the school gate waiting for her, but she set her mouth in a line and carried on walking towards them. She saw the foot stuck out to trip her, the eyes hungry for her tears but she swung her ponytail, looked into the far distance, beyond the mean faces and the ugly school buildings. Now she was strong.

Barren Ground, Mark Gibbs. Mixed media.

l i o n e l

Paintings by

P o e m s

b y

J o s e p h i n e

D i c k i n s o n

p l ay f o r d

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Excerpts from a series of 64 short poems by Josephine Dickinson, written as part of a collaboration with artist Lionel Playford and film-maker/director Alastair Simmons. Their installation, Earth Journey, was exhibited

earth journey

at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, during the Words by the Water festival in 2010. Future plans include the publication of a book and another phase of the

Where is my Pole? To where am I going? What is my true North?

What is not here? Nothing

10 Moonlight, Starlight, Wet in the water. The one I miss Is planet light 19 From the font of the sky In the retort of mine eye From this moonlight smell I thee distil 20 Apple blossom By Silly Hall. A door

project: Journey Further, Look Deeper.

24 “There are no direct ‘programmatic’ links between individual poems and paintings”, says Josephine Dickinson, “but some of them refer to recognizable

I am greedy For seasons – Four times a day Every day of the year

aspects or features.” Nevertheless, these words and images arise from a profoundly personal engagement

with the local landscapes inhabited by both poet

At night There’s another light Down here By the river

and painter in the valleys of the South Tyne and the Black Burn, near Alston in the North Pennines.

30 This is a planet This is a place on a planet This is a river in this place This is the place the river made Here I am standing in it

Quick Cleugh

Little Rundle

44 I am a thing contained in this world Which itself is contained in something else 46 It is easy to overlook But it has a gate And trees And gravestones And boarded up doors and windows 48 I was water I remembered everything Everywhere 49 How can you argue With a river that tears down Your favourite tree And all the bank besides? 53 I flew five times Upriver for you And now I have flown Into you 54 Stars Pour Through Your Crown 55

Which way Swims the salmon?

A window does do that – Simply allows The brown flow And tender leaves To show

I tried to count the bridges. It was like asking What is the grass?

Silly Hall Looks out Over a precipice Like a moon

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37 These empty meadows Are peopled with occasional encounters – A friend glimpsed from behind, Walking far ahead, Or the sound Of feet bearing heavy loads

Black Band

stephanie leightonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

ian hill

Stephanie Leighton, Solway Squall (detail)

Writer, bookbinder and printmaker takes a walk under the towering skies of the Solway and finds himself in collagraphs.

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W eather eye

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This could be the end of the earth. I am walking a track which divides the sea from the land. On my left, a low ridge of grasses is furred with gorse bushes, bent in memory of westerly winds. To the right, a muddy creek is slowly filling with the rising tide, bringing the scent of silt and salt water; a smell like damp metal or dried blood. Dunlin detach from the sand bars into plumes of flight, each bird pressing close to the heart of the flock, their wing beats flashing in time in the high sun: flash-flashglide, flash-flash-glide. It is a land stripped to its elements: pebbles and mud, clouds and sky. And everywhere, there are birds. Gulls congregate on the tip of one of the sandbars, poised in expectation of flight, jostling with impatience like children pressed to the school gates in the afternoon sun. A flock of Dunlin scatter as a single Marsh Harrier drifts low to the horizon, lazily scanning for eggs or chicks, the chance opportunism of predation. At the end of this gravel spit, sandbars shift between the courses of rivers. The still air is broken by the occasional plop of sand subsiding into the creek, each tide edging through the slow processes of geomorphology, the subtle shifting patterns of mud and water. The sand is neatly rippled, bearing only the dimpled passage of shellfish and the footprints of birds. Tide draws the minerals from the silt; traces of dark sinter are nested in the hollows of each ripple. The light here on this July day is intense. Beyond the creeks and river courses, the horizon is washed of colour, pale blue, unattainable. I crane back my head and watch the clouds drifting across the marble-blue sky, opulent and aloof, so high above this flat earth. And I realise that the track out to the point divides three elements: the sea, the land, the sky. It exists at the juncture of them all, poised between the familiar and the unknown, the solid and the fluid. There is something in this landscape which speaks to me; some ancestral memory of a huge vault of blue sketched with clouds and the fading vapour trails of passing aeroplanes. It is a memory of my childhood, growing up in the East Midlands, walking across vast fields stripped of their crops under wide autumn skies. It is a memory not of landscape, but of the absence of landscape: a place in which nothing is present but the sky. It is said that God made the Fens flat so that he could see what everyone was doing. That sense of being watched is here in the Solway, too: the ever-present eye of the weather and sky.

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I am remembering something more recent, too: a series of prints by my friend, the printmaker Stephanie Leighton. Stephanie works in collagraphy, an uncertain and experimental form of printmaking, using found materials and collage to hold the ink on the plate; a medium in which the results can be unpredictable, in which so much is left to chance. I saw her at a small craft fair a couple of weeks ago with a new series of prints; landscapes in which the sky is the dominant force, where the land is relegated to a low, flat horizon. Many of her prints draw on elemental forms; the shapes of hedgerows and fields around west Cumbria, but this new series were landscapes striking in their openness; images of sky as the principal element, images which seemed to me to relate directly to those same wide horizons of the Solway plain. “I don’t know whether to call them collagraphs or monoprints”. I am sitting with Stephanie in her studio on the first floor of her home. There is something of the eyrie in this room of light and stained wood, with its view over the sloping garden and old apple trees to the distant hills. The air smells of oil-based inks and pencil shavings. The floor is littered with used plates; varnish and ink, dried onto card or hardboard. Her old printing press lies patient on an old desk; a piece of 1950s utility furniture. All the steps of the printing process are here, scattered around the room, but impossible to piece together. We are discussing the process of giving names to pictures. “I love the way the ink tells me what it is,” she says. “I can stand aside and let it speak to me.” Her perception, her reverence and patience for the picture to emerge from apparent chaos, makes each print unique, each one a dance of inspiration and chance. There is something visceral about the way Stephanie approaches her prints, something inspired and guided, but inexplicable. She describes to me the importance of process over product, and it is clear that she is following ideas and connections which present themselves as she works, layers of colour and texture built up by happenstance and trust. She is laying prints from her portfolio onto the floor in front of me, pointing out the shifts in ink pattern from one to the next, the marks and textures from a paintbrush handle, a screwdriver, a Stanley knife. I am drawn again to the print which dazzled me when I first saw it two weeks ago; another landscape of infinite skies and low horizons, another sky of moods and textures. In this one, there is a path leading into the distance, indistinct and indirect, through the colours and textures of moorland and heath; browns and ochres. It is that path which draws us in, makes us want to follow it, through the meadows of breeze-tugged grasses, over creases in the soft land, on and on to the blue horizon, where the clouds meet the distant sea.

Stephanie Leighton, Heath and Sky

“ I love the way the ink tells me what it is... I can stand aside and let it speak to me.

”

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hunters

Pauline Yarwood The page will have to be turned in the end. Every year the unwanted pictorial calendar and every year the predictable January Bruegel. Just now, for a while longer, I’m grabbing on to the tail end of the year I already have. There’s comfort here, warmth and colour, months to mull over, summer’s music to remember, a year, a beautiful year, safely lived. Turn the page and you’re up against it snow scene, skaters, country life pulling together, the expectant glow of fresh starts. I don’t want a fresh start, I want more of the same. Look. There’s a darkening sky and darker waters, the snow-laden deadening, leadening of a life harshly lived. And those hunters and dogs. What are they hunting exactly?

Pieter Bruegel, Hunters in the Snow Kunsthistorisches museum, vienna.

hare

Jennifer Copley Some call me ghost-in-the-grass or dew-thumper but I prefer beat-the-wind because that’s what I do when I’m flying from the dogs and your gun which you carry loosely across your arm. The arm that carries death. When I’m out of sight and you decide not to bother anyway, wanting whisky, your dinner and a good fi re, I’ll be leaping between hills, my black ears flat; the white of my belly seen only by the grass, the ditches and the purple streams.

16 David Cemmick, One Step Ahead. Bronze

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interior landscapes Martyn Halsall

Gradually the old Dutch masters came indoors exchanging oaks’ billowing armadas and harbour studies for a lemon set aside with a curl of rind like a Tropic or Equator unfurling from a tilted globe. Water, always, and evidence of water roads sketched swiftly as iced canals, with a muffled hand, or caught in a galaxy of droplets by a broken glass. Sea surges through the room, the boom of ocean bass voiced with sailors’ tales, the surf of shanties salting a studio, overheard over an easel. Sails bloom through early pages in The Golden Age of Dutch Painting. Then a woman holds crystalware like a surgeon’s mask, to test an angle of wine. Her husband gauges her eyes, his tilted hat eclipsing interruption, his landscaped cape creased to the runnels of sand after ebb, or of plough. Quiet greens in their room are framed in the shadows of trees in the background painting, the old outdoors has become interior. Grey stillness hums an echo from the lute. Frames’ wavering gold restrains transparent skies that allowed the canvas to seep through late morning’s rain exchanging cumulus for a page of fieldmice. Jan Vermeer, The Wine Glass © bpk - Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und geschichte. gemäldegalerie, Berlin

There are portraits, Girl with the Pearl, Study of a Head, a woman playing a spinet while someone answers a door, or a servant girl is sent out to fetch one of those maps of the world propped against wainscots.

the hunt

Jennifer Copley Today in the dark woods I netted fish. Their scales shone from the tree-tops, their eyes bulged with sap.

But the hare I fancied, the most beautiful one, out-swam me. His lungs had never held so

One of the fishes – such a big fellow – begged for the life of his wife and child. I yielded.

much breath. I see him now, on the far shore, licking salt from his paws, his mouth creased up, laughing.

Later, in the sea’s waves I hunted hares. Their legs were fleeter than the tide, their scuts white foam.

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The Little Girl at the Door John Rice

She is definitely going out, I think. Yes, I’m sure now. She is dressed as if she is going out. Black shoes, black stockings, black coat and a lampshade-shaped black hat. Darkly she melts into her own softening shadow. Framed against a ghost-white door she is mid-air between an inside and an outside; the calmness of home or the chaos of a world outside. Her moonish face neither smiles nor frowns. Her hands – slender, delicate – clasp the brass door knob, making ready to turn, or perhaps not. Nothing moves. There is a blood-hum silence. The unblemished door remains firmly closed. Perhaps she has been posed by some practised photographer whose poised choreography has captured the still-point of childhood’s dance. But this image was not written with light – it is the brushwork of a blue ghost’s hand. Today we view this still girl in her static world not through the whorls and whirls of an early lens, but trapped silent in a certain charmed moment. The moment when a little girl at the door held in thrall an artist’s ready eye. Ah, life and its door to death.

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In the absence of owls Mark Carson

Kate Bentley, The Absence of Owls Watercolour

The picture grew in from the cold, sere, searing cold hedgerows flayed to the quick, tortured across middle distance and a cottage, a hint of man, man the homemaker too comfortable so it’s rubbed out, rubbed and rubbed leaving a snowspace dibbled with dirt. This is a picture of nothing - consider the space see the essence of gate in the dirt, a five-bar field gate now sketched in, but the top bar will be broken by the man without a cottage bitter in the chill weather and anxious to kill for his supper yet he spoils the picture by his too-personal anger so he’s rubbed out, rubbed maybe a Barn Owl will shortly appear, to fly along the hedgerow searching for a vole - but it’s a cliché so the owl doesn’t show.

Line Sarah Le Brocq, Children and Washing

Terry Jones

Mixed media

She’s slim; barely a girl: her arms thin, her white legs thin. She sweeps a broken path, brings yellowing papers to the dustbin, wipes a washing-line with an old cloth. He says, not calls, her name, and she follows without a glance to the work she’s leaving, and she’s the one who draws the curtains. In two minutes an old bed is banging. Now she comes from shadow into the sun, blue eyes unblinking, her bare arms full with a day’s washing to hang. Still, alone, he sits on worn stone steps to watch until light drives him inside. Drying in time, the washing stiffens on the sagging line.

anD

Jane 20

by terry JoneS

Photograph by Horatio Lawson

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Ta n n e r

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Out strolling under the underpass I pause to read sprayed wisdoms in the gloom and piss-smell, learning that ‘Jane shags everybody’ and ‘Tanner is the only gay in the village.’ Though I doubt the absolute truth, imagining that Jane, passing through, having learned from a reliable source that Tanner was the author of the claim concerning her sexual predilections, retaliated in kind, or that Tanner, similarly motivated, was the one to strike back. Certainly, the respective sprays (lurid orange suggesting self-abandonment, and vivid pink – indicating solipsistic desperation) suggest a repressed frenzy of vengefulness. I also consider that both Jane and Tanner may have made the claims about themselves, utilising graffitos in a neglected urban margin as a confessional release of self-hatred; or that unknown, unrelated third parties may have been vindictively responsible, with both Jane and Tanner unaware, and I entertain other possible permutations.

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Overhead, in Olympian indifference, traffic thunders, cars, lorries, buses, each carrying from city to city their retinues of Janes and Tanners and others or even the intended Jane and Tanner, each blissfully unconscious of being traduced. But as I emerge into sunlight, I wonder, sadly, if Jane might be, and realise that somewhere there is indeed a ‘Jane’ who shags everybody,

dank exclusion and dog-shit confusion, ‘Jane’ and ‘Tanner’ become of the essence, constituent elements of the divine: she holy in her shameless and beautiful shagging, and he blessed (bless him) in his solitude. I pass towards the city centre, its babble and bustle, ads and admonishments, eateries and etcetaras, its ecstatic celebration of the emptied sign,

and a ‘Tanner’ who is both gay and isolated, that whatever vicious or offended intentions lay behind the appearance of the names, and despite their calligraphic crudity, they embody a kind of Platonic truth, a numinous mathematical absoluteness, one that transcends all and any doubt, such that ‘Jane’ and ‘Tanner’exist in the same realm

as if the underpass were a new doorway. But, I muse, as the pedestrianised spaces open, this being the case, the empirical Jane’s imputed sexual profligacy, and the actual Tanner’s social and sexual alienation (if the case) seems, somehow, wholly human and wholly sad, and I wish them well, wish them whole, poor Jane and poor Tanner, poor Jane and Tanner.

of logical necessity as pure numbers and their relations, as the law of identity, as the principle of reason and universality, so the underpass itself becomes a rare treasure, like the Egyptian tomb whose dark, buried walls are emblazoned with the ur-examples of geometrical drawings, the first axioms of space; so here in litter and contingency, in

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Drab by pamela coren

In from the wet on Monday morning with a wet dog into the dark hall with its pictures of small views, moving through the large dull rooms, old things of little value arranged to best advantage on wooden furniture which I polish now and then and the heavy shake of wet leaves pressing the roof into quiet around the house which is fusty with raincoats and leaking shoes for since I was smitten with Gothic at fifteen in John Rylands Library in wet Manchester I find myself among faded baize and dust, arriving at shops when the wraps are going on and joining small societies on their last legs still it is not dark enough for lights and in the fields of damaged wheat before the slanting rain drove us in the flowers held a cool lavender colour and in my heart is a sudden thought that the high point of civilisation is not The Scream or that robbers have stolen it again but that humankind has made arrangements, sometimes successful, to come in out of the rain, and now sitting in my socks, the dog in his towel, I can watch the bamboo in the garden tossing its hair in the pouring floodlight of rain.

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issue

c o n t r i b u t o r s

Kate Bentley is an award-winning professional

Mark Gibbs is a member of West Walls Studios in

Lionel Playford lives and works in Garrigill

painter and art teacher whose studio is in Holme, south Cumbria. www.katebentley.co.uk

Carlisle. He creates animal sculptures, exciting mixed media paintings, oil paintings and watercolours. www.markgibbs.co.uk

in the Cumbrian North Pennines. His current practice involves drawing on location with found materials such as peat, clay, shale and soil and producing imaginative evocations in paint of his experiences of the landscape. lionelplayford.net

Peter Blake is an English pop artist, born 1932, best known for his design of the sleeve for the Beatles’ album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder dropped the ‘h’ from his name in 1559. Very famous. Flemish.

Christopher Burns is the author of a book of short stories and six novels, most recently A Division of the Light. A single story chapbook, Lexicon, appeared from Nightjar Press last year. He was born and brought up in west Cumbria and lives in Whitehaven.

Mark Carson has been in Ulverston for almost thirty years, the last ten rooted in the nourishing tilth of the Furness poetry scene – 4th Monday Poets, Barrow Writers, and the Poem and a Pint organisation. He is narrowly published in discerning magazines. David Cemmick is a sculptor who works in the Eden Valley. With mould maker Sebastian Wylder, he founded Cemmick and Wylder fine art bronze in 2005, creating and producing original limited edition bronze wildlife sculptures. www.cemmickandwylder.com Jennifer Copley was born in Barrow-in-Furness in her grandmother’s house and lives there still. She has published three collections of poetry, most recently Beans in Snow (Smokestack, 2009). A pamphlet, Living Daylights, was published last year by Happenstance. www.jennifercopley.net

Pamela Coren enjoyed an academic career that produced papers on Spenser, Donne, Jonson, Campion and, more recently, Gurney and Hopkins. She began publishing her own poetry in 2000, appearing in many magazines. Her collection The Blackbird Inspector was published by Laurel Books in 2005. She lives near Sedbergh. www.poetrypf.co.uk/pamelacorenpage.html Josephine Dickinson has been profoundly deaf since childhood but taught music for many years. She lives near Alston and has published four collections of poems, most recently Night Journey (Flambard, 2008). www.josephinedickinson.com

Harriet Halhed was born in Australia in 1850 but spent most of her working life in the south east of England as a painter of portraits, figures and domestic scenes.

Martyn Halsall is a former Guardian journalist who lives and writes in West Cumbria. His poetry has appeared in many magazines and in two Lancaster Litfest Flax anthologies. His awards include the Jack Clemo Memorial Prize (twice). He is poetry editor of Third Way magazine, and is about to begin work as poet-in-residence at Carlisle Cathedral.

Ian Hill is a writer, bookbinder, photographer and printmaker who grew up in Lincolnshire but has lived in Cumbria for 20 years. He blogs regularly and has an essay just published in the third Dark Mountain anthology of ‘uncivilised’ writing. www.printedland.blogspot.com

Terry Jones was born in Bradford and now lives near Carlisle. His first collection of poems, Furious Resonance, was published last year by Poetry Salzburg. Earlier this year he won the Bridport Poetry Prize. terryjonespoetry.weebly.com

Horatio Lawson was born in1986 in Edinburgh and graduated in Sculpture from the city’s College of Art in 2008. He is a former member of the Edinburgh Photographic Society. Profoundly deaf since birth, he now lives in North Berwick, East Lothian.

John Rice is a poet, photographer, and storyteller who lives near Sedbergh. He has published thirteen books of poetry for both adults and children, including Bears Don’t Like Bananas, Dreaming Of Dinosaurs, and Guzzling Jelly With Giant Gorbelly. From 2008 to 2010 was Glasgow’s Subway Poet-in-Residence. www.poetjohnrice.com

Mary Robinson lives in west Cumbria. Her first collection of poetry, The Art of Gardening, was published by Flambard in 2010. She won first prize in the 2012 Words by the Water/Notting Hill Essay Writing Competition, and a new pamphlet, Uist Waulking Song, was published recently by Westward Books. www.maryrobinson.org.uk

Jonathan Ruppin is the Web Editor for Foyles bookshops. In 2010, he was a judge for the Costa Novel Award. He serves on the Advisory Board of the new independent publisher, And Other Stories. Jan Vermeer was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle class life.

Pauline Yarwood was born in Cumbria and grew up in Manchester. She lives in the Lyth Valley, where she writes, makes pots and tends a very boggy garden next to the River Gilpin.

Sarah Le Brocq paints, draws and makes collages in Carlisle. www.sarahlebrocq.co.uk

Stephanie Leighton has been a printmaker since 1994. She learned her craft at the Co-operative print studio in Oxford. Since moving to Cumbria in 2001, she has continued to experiment with a range of print techniques, including collagraphy. makingatthestudio.weebly.com Jeremy Over lives near Cockermouth, where he works as a policy adviser for the Department for Work and Pensions. His first collection was A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (Carcanet, 2001). His second, Deceiving Wild Creatures, was published in 2009.

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