Woke up this morning thinking about how I love poetry (AND my first daughter, Isla, who is two today! Love my second daughter Freya, too just as much!) So went and read a couple of my own poems, the first from ‘Penumbra’ and the second from ‘Stones of Mithras’ and then I also picked up and read some of (one of my favourite poets) Pablo Neruda. To me Neruda is famous but perhaps you’ve never heard of him? If you haven’t look him up, he writes beautifully direct love poetry especially. I’ve attached his Sonnet XXV to show what I mean.
 
All that is Feeling
 
Feelings are a curse,
No rock ever wept over a dead child,
Being blind, it was never blinded,
All that I feel,
Is a curse.
 
Words fall dead upon the page,
I am suicided by feeling,
A word-curse numbs my thought,
Carves my pain into a statue of obscure emotion,
The art of feeling things makes me weary,
I am tempted only to drown,
I am a coast defined by the sea.
 
Upon this beach are the vanquished,
Stones of memory, images of you,
Feelings of ocean and endlessness,
Ocean of sea, of water, of me,
Waves appear, distant, like brief souls.
Nothing I have felt will remain:
 
I am not a book of words,
I am not ink adhering to pulp,
I am and will, and will not.
 
Eternity is not a feeling,
A thought, a cup or a blessing.
 
Nothing is held,
What is held is nothing eternal,
Always, no existence holds.
 
The feeling of living,
A curse, a blessing, a silence.
 
 
A death is nothing:
A word upon no page,
The smile of no child,
The eye of no thought,
The breath of no sadness,
The course of no heart.
 
The curse is felt,
The curse is spoken.
All that is feeling,
Is a curse.
 
we are made
 
You are ruby, diamond, emerald, pearl,
you are lapis lazuli, pyrites, tigers-eye,
from rose and granite you are made.
 
First meeting,
at the Ashmolean,
strolling, talking,
touching elbow,
gently, leaning in,
like the wind-blown roses,
across the street,
it seemed,
there were scattered petals,
at our feet,
 
I have been stolen, I thought
vast acres of my heart,
cut down and harvested
for new things.
 
The petals still flutter, fly
like old flags, but
in the shadow of a
new nation, a new world.
Both Terra Firma,
and Terra Incognita.
Both, feed this new earth,
this eternal spring.
 
Intangible living colours,
stream in the bright waters,
pain sinks like a pebble,
to the riverbed,
and dark thoughts are washed away.
 
 
And nothing, changes my past,
but everything, changes my future.
 
I will pick up,
the petals,
and carry these gentle emblems of my past,
for they are a blanket, a bed,
a rock, and
a foundation,
on which to lay,
new coloured stones
of being.
 
There is more,
on this ancient hill,
than echo and memory
there is,
a speaking of stones.
 
We are Sala Rossa ruby-red,
we are diamond, emerald, pearl,
we are, you and I, lapis lazuli, pyrites and tigers-eye,
in amber, sapphire, malachite and marble strong,
from gentle quartz, carnelian and desert rose,
we will grow.
From rose and granite, we are made.
 
Sonnet XXV
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
 
 

Great art is like the sea, ever changing before your eyes and like the sand beneath your feet ever shifting, changing how you feel about the earth, altering your perspective just that little bit, often without you realising. Art is that breath of sea air which ruffles your thoughts like breeze through your hair.
Recently I had the good fortune to find myself in an exhibition space in Milton Keynes. I had just bought two graphic novels, one, on the life of Louise Michel, the feminist revolutionary and anarchist who earned the sobriquet ‘The Red Virgin of Montmartre’ during the Paris Commune uprising of 1871. The other was a life of Edvard Munch by Steffen Kverneland, a seven year labour of love, which illustrates the power of graphic storytelling, to inform and transform one’s knowledge and awareness of a subject with a rapidity unknown to other arts. The pictures in front of me echoed some of this storytelling power and were by two artists from Milton Keynes, Shelly Wyn-De-Bank and Christine Gallagher (and whilst I enjoyed the work of the latter it’s the former I want to concentrate on here).
Artists grow with time, the breadth of their vision, if they are industrious and serious, literally expands and the panorama they paint stretches like canvas in the frame.
Shelly is an artist.
Although this is to a degree a retrospective, her most recent work, seems to me, to have moved into new territory.  I’ve known Shelly for many years and she’s always had talent. But that’s not enough to become an artist. She has worked hard, graduated from a top art school and put steel into her work. This learnt know-how or what the ancients Greeks would call ‘techne’, is necessary and  fundamental  but true, living, breathing, bona fide art, ignites the interest of the viewer because the artist has developed quite literally a vision, a weltanschuuang, a philosophy, a creative and unique(-ish) perspective.
Artists can be ideologically naive, politically ill informed or savage but they are rarely theoretically ignorant or without an embedded sense of the purpose of picture making. There are, very rarely, artist savants who barely have to think, who’s genius sits upon their shoulders whispering, unbidden, in their ears (and unrecognised  by the savant as the source of their creativity). But the fruit, borne from the sweat of the brow, of most artists comes from a tree of, if not knowledge, then inspired thought, contemplative action and consciousness, filtered through theory. Said simply, great art is full of ideas. Whether it’s Magritte, where the ideas are to the fore or Poussin , who’ s ideas arrive in your mind, like the light of the dawn or a sudden afternoon blaze on a patch of wall, it is the sub-pictorial that brings the picture to life. 
Material, medium, manner, form, this is the genesis. Form, motif, style, theme, idea, this is the Art. The medium and material are the Ur-genesis of the idea. Together they  generate and allow the literal shaping of manner, character, genre, type, form and style. They allow the motif, the tic, the obsession to flourish. The materials display and embrace the theme. On the theme rests the idea.
Shelly’s irregular narrative has taken time, years, to maturate but now the people of Milton Keynes are privileged and lucky to see the real beginnings of that narrative play out in their city. Imagine, very approximately, Munch’s ‘The Scream’, just the head, isolated and with a dark background. Now think of a dozen or so, medium sized portraits (mono-prints) and a lesser number, in the same style, of small square portraits. This then is the rogue’s gallery of half-ghost like, half dumbstruck villains that people her creation called the Archive of Irregular and this is the primary work of the exhibition.
Previously, I would have described a major theme of Shelly’s work, as a depiction of a dystopic Alice through the looking glass realm. A horrorscope of, as just one example, animal parts transplanted onto sweet (and not so sweet) little girls, in party dresses. Often the paintings being given darkly humorous titles that were puns and plays on words. This was still here, with pictures such as, the sinister ‘Nursery Crimes’ where a man, with a viciously cocked head, stands behind a young girl whilst a young woman in front strokes her face or ‘Deer Sweet Girl’ a hand coloured mono-print depicting the body of a deer (wearing a see-through dress) with the head of young girl (hair tied with a bow). Alternatively, using ink and line, Shelly has the skill of an Aubrey Beardsley, the illustrator who decorated Wilde’s work so brilliantly and so mischievously. The best example here, being ‘Familial Ties’ from last year. A young woman, with a Venetian mask of hair over her face, striped leggings and DM boots, is bent over, dragging, by puppet strings, eight soft toys, faceless dolls, teddy-bears etc. The drag of the family, the puppet (or child) on the string, displaced fur or hair and so on,  are the kind of gritty, disturbed motif that hints at a hidden personal painterly pain.
This is skilful, engaging, personal, humorous; the disturbed fantastical. The new narrative, is less immediately perceived, it is hidden in the scuffed black backdrop. Our archivist has remained in the vault, these are talking pictures, animated in such a way that we can ignore the biography of the artist long enough to enjoy the images sitting in the armchair of our own consciousness.
 I was going to talk, in terms of technique, of the oddly thick brush strokes on canvas, until a friend told me what a mono-print actually was and how they are created.  To begin with, the prefix, ‘Mono’ refers to the medium’s uniqueness. You only get one ‘Mono-print’, one original picture (clue’s in the name) though you can, apparently, use the inked plate more than once. An appropriate surface is ‘inked’, (plate-glass, in this case, I believe) the paper is then placed on that surface and an image created by drawing, impressing or etching (?)  onto the paper. Something approximating this anyway (my ignorance on this subject is quite as dark as any of Shelly’s pictures). The point being, that the pictures here, had a wide grainy ‘brushstroke’ that was dynamic and alive but produced a ghostly trace or impression in the ink/paint.
The faces in these images where like the inner soul of the human being. Or, they could be our outer shells, but the dishevelled, shambling, pallid, scumbled skin felt less like a depiction of our literal selves  and more a picture of how deformed we are, or can be, inside.  Many of the eyes of these characters were made up from the black void behind them, as if they were blind or saw only blackness. The eyes weren’t windows into the soul, what you had in front of you was the oxymoronic, ‘embodied spirit’. This gave then a ghoulish outlook, an aspect of the phantom. And yet these were not evil figures, more malformed; a meaty fragility still hung about their corpse coloured skin. They were like the empty husk of a politician that Britain boasts a hoard of, some with slicked-down Hitler-like crossovers, others with teeth like the crumbling stone of the houses of parliament.
None were blemish free but one or two, those with eyeballs and not just empty sockets, had aqua bright irises that reminded me of our blue planet seen from outer space. These eyes were bright with life and spoke of dreams still wished for, sight still to be used. One had a chunk of white smoke coming out of his smiling mouth, another smeared red lips like the Joker from Batman but each had its own distinctive being, whilst still being part of the uniform cabinet of curiosities.
This is the work of an artist that has freed herself from her past and is moving out to sea. She is floating in the ocean of ideas.
This Archive or collective of regular Irregulars are images you can paint your own ideas on:  ghosts, gangsters, ugly, soulless, soul-filled, ethereal, earthy, Dorian Gray depictions of the inner self it doesn’t matter, whatever the label  you hang upon them, they provoke a reaction. They have the breath of the earth and the taste of the sea about them. If you take your time with them, the sand shifts between your toes.

My most recent project, an audio book (and kindle version) of WB Yeats early book, The Rose, has required me to write a short foreword that I thought I’d sneak in as a blog as it’s all I’ve had time to write recently. I found recording the book interesting but editing the results was especially fascinating. Getting the right cuts etc. means you have to listen to the text over and over again. Once I’d finished this extrememly repetitive process I loved the poetry even more than I had before. I think shows what great strength and beauty the poetry has, anyway the foreword…
 
If you love poetry, you can love the poetry of William Butler Yeats. A little patience brings great reward and the poems will ‘wrap you round’ if you let them. Yeats was a man of many dimensions and literary personae and a certain fear can be instilled by this reputation in the potential reader. It was not for no reason that Richard Ellmann subtitled his famous biography, The Man and the Masks but like all the best poetry, one can enjoy Yeats’ poetic gift without knowing anything of the man who wrote the poetry or his mythopoetic endeavours and subterfuges. I believe if you read, and re-read, the poems in this collection, their depth, beauty, romance and brilliance will shine through into the heart of any reader and ‘light up your russet brow’.
The Rose was the second collection of poetry from a young man who was full of the romance of his native country. In 1893, when The Rose was published, Yeats was a member of the Gaelic league but like many proto-political Irish nationalists he was hardly expecting the storm that arrived in 1916. His poetry, at this time, was symbolic, apolitical and he was content to write, as he says in the opening poem of the collection, in English, rather than ‘chaunt a tongue [Gaelic] that men do not know’.
Yeats uses the image of the rose to symbolize a number of different things within the collection. Perhaps the most private reference is to Maud Gonne, his great unrequited love, whom he corresponded with almost his entire life, from the age of 23 to his death in 1939. She, who was politically, the more active nationalist, was his dark rose: thorny, untouchable, beautiful. The rose, more obviously, stands for Ireland itself, indeed in Irish mythology Ireland or Eire is often referred to as the ‘Roisin Dubh’ or ‘dark rose’.
Whether one knows the mythology of Ireland or not, one can enjoy Yeats’ poems because it is self-evident that the poet knows the myths from the inside. Root and flower, scent, and symbolic petal, decorate his interior self and this communicates and translates itself, powerfully and imaginatively, into the psyche of the reader. One need not have ever heard of Cuchulainn before, to know he is a great and mythical leader of the Irish. One need not know, that at seventeen, Cuchulainn defended Ulster from Mebt, the raiding queen of Connacht, who had planned to steal the great stud bull, Donn Cuailnge, to recognize that Yeats is drawing from a rich mythological earth of tales long told. Cuchulainn, his wife Emer, Conchubar his uncle, Usna, Conchubar’s wife and Fergus, Cuchulainn’s great rival, all have that gravitas on the page that is pungent, remarkable and ancient.
The collection also contains one of Yeats’ most famous poems, The Lake Isle of Innisfree which is rightly famous and stands alone in the sea of poetry perfectly happily, without reference to the rest of the collection. But for the poet, often the poems of a collection are borne into the world, with the intention that they be read together, so as to cross fertilize and for the seed of one poem to blow through the air of another. The truth is The Lake Isle of Innisfree was planted amongst the other ‘roses’ of this collection, as one of many, to colour and make fragrant, our dreams; The Rose, is a unified complex of poetry, a collection, a vessel, a bag, its symbolic petals and thorns were, and are, for the ‘pilgrim soul in you’. As the aged Druid says to Fergus, ‘Take… this little bag of dreams;/Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round’.