Queer creative, writer, artist, poet, witch and activist Indigo Moon shares ‘Only Star’ and other poems from a collection she created for her recent MA Environmental Humanities, showcasing the natural world and its changes over a human lifespan.
400 words: estimated reading time = 2 minutes
Each of these poems takes inspiration from the great American poet, Emily Dickinson, and how she allowed her imagination and dazzling insight to run free in her poetry. Each moment allows for deep reflection, creative wildness and empowerment.
Daffodils are the birth of spring Yellow paints the fields, and become the shield Bumblebees collect heliotrope nectar and butterflies travel far Splendour to the eye does blossom eradicate the scar, I wish to get lost in the meadows and become the Sun’s only star.
Crescendo
My brain has a song that has no chorus, just a multicoloured verse where I ask the ravens and dragonflies, help me find where the crescendo lies.
The Wing
Silent is the wing that flies north to the power line, where winds buckle and rains are unkind Clouds that travel are as arcane as volcanic ash when there’s no eruption.
A Brush to Fingertip
Rhythm marauding at the back rooms cups a check, brushes a lip, their fingertip, a grace to my outline, a decadent sweet, a most thriving constellation.
Threads
Birds, bumblebees, blossom, Distract me now or confront the wind and tell it of home Fair – in case of this thread and glimmer peace in my sacred bed.
Doubt of Birds
Can you doubt – a flock of birds, instinctual, their wings synchronised, destination felt by currents of wind and water When this, you, I, becomes the bird, we never want to walk again.
Three of these poems have featured in the pages for creative contributions to our Environmental Keywords series, where Indigo generously offered her responses to the words ‘Justice’, ‘Resilience’ and ‘Transitions’. And she previously contributed a poem, ‘Frozen’, to Day 16 of our Quarantine Connection series during the first UK Covid lockdown in 2020.
You can read Indigo’s previous post for ClimateCultures, I am Purpose — a short story evoking ideas of conversation with the universe to illuminate times of zoonotic pandemic and climate crisis and reflect on the presence of signals from within.
And you can explore Creative Being, the site and community Indigo created to inspire positive change and amplify marginalised voices, interviewing artists, writers and activists.
A sapphic and neuroqueer artist, writer, activist, curator, and founder of Creative Being, a platform and community using creativity to amplify positive change and marginalised voices.
Writer Philip Webb Gregg shares a new poem exploring rewilding as a sideways step into a stranger world, resisting simplifications of ‘progress’ and the gains and losses of our current model, even as we seek to change it.
1,100 words: estimated reading time 4.5 minutes
Re.Wilding
we will eat meat still dressed in fur, feather and claw. we will give darkness again a place in our bodies. all sickness shall be cherished, allowed sweat, gland
and pore wherein to thrive. we will run after each other in the dead of night – blood on our tongues. penicillin shall be
crucified upon the hill and forgotten.
our men will wander, blind and bludgeoning, opening debates with bubbling streams and the burnt-out husks of trees, forming conclusions with starlings, finding
answers, as they always have, in the spit of their palms.
our children will die, of course, crushed between their mothers’ thighs. but it won’t matter, because our women will know at last what it means to be free.
our teeth will rot and hang slack in our jaws. we will neither know the names of the stars, nor of each other. but we will hold
each other, nonetheless. nameless and gasping. we will discover again the truth of words that have no place in our hot human skins. and with these words we will say, as we die: this is how
it should be. this death was given by the wind. life shall feast on ash and
the only love shall be the love of dirt and rain.
the air will be clear and the rivers white as our bones and we will breathe. for the first time, in so long. we will breathe. our hearts will be drumsticks in the hands of painted, matted shamans. long dead languages will suddenly spill from our lips like drool, like regurgitated food. like laughter. the wild stones that hold up the sky will kiss and kiss and kiss until they are bent-over bleeding-mouthed and all of a sudden, the clouds shall crash to the ground, heavier than we ever thought they possibly could be. there will be no patterns any more. only perfect, perfect humanity
This poem started as all good poems do — in a state of agony. I was lying prone in a chair, mouth gaping wide, feeling infinitely fragile as I stared up into the eyes of my torturer cum-saviour who operated without remorse amid my pitiful moans. That’s right, I was at the dentist.
And it struck me, as I walked out with a numb jaw and much lighter wallet, unable to speak or barely think past the painkillers, that humanity had never had it so goddamn good.
All my life I’ve believed, no, I have known, that this society (by which I mean Western, capitalist society) is a lie. A con. A dream of progress, behind which sits the ugly nightmare of perdition. I know this because of my childhood. My mother who is an activist. My father who was a poet. The community I grew up among, and all those I’ve met along the way have only served to intensify my distrust of the current system and the certainty that it must, and shall, change.
Not that you need a hippy childhood to come to this conclusion. The truth of it can be seen by looking out the window, reading a thermometer, or simply watching the waves rise. But maybe it is also true that I have too often overlooked the benefits of progress.
How many lives have been saved by science? How many children born? How much pain averted? And shouldn’t we be grateful for all that we’ve been given? Yes, of course we should. But we should also acknowledge all that we’ve lost. The secret ways. The hidden ways that too easily kindled and charred when the light of logic shone into the wallowing shadows of faith. The idea of ‘not-knowing’ is not a bad thing. In fact, there is salvation there, in the humility and the hugeness of the world.
The idea of rewilding is not to progress by going backwards, but instead to take a step sideways, into a greener, stranger sense of ourselves and the world. This poem is a satire on everything we have gained and everything we have lost. It is an invitation to take that step, neither forward nor backward, but just a little bit slantways.
Find out more
We are grateful to artist, and tutor of art history and drawing, Luisa-Maria MacCormack for the image which accompanies Philip’s poem. It comes from her series ‘And the Beast which I Saw’.
As well as Philip’s previous posts for ClimateCultures, you can also read his contribution to our Quarantine Connection series: his story, What We Find in the Guts of the Bodies that the River Gives Us, appeared on Day 2 of this special 40-day series of new and archive material from ClimateCultures members during Covid-19 lockdown.
In his essay for the Dark Mountain Project, Where the Wild Things Aren’t, Philip reflects on his experiences living in London after a childhood in rural Spain: “If we allow ourselves, we may begin to notice that nature is everywhere, just as it always has been. And it is possible to feel like a part of a wider world, even here. There are birds perched on blackened chimneys and squirrels running across abandoned railways. There is a wound of green cutting across the grey pavement. There are trees which explode with life in spring and then wilt into sleep in autumn. The breeze is still cool in summer. In winter, the cold takes no notice. The rain doesn’t care. And that, to me, is at the core of what the wider world stands for. The lesson we can take home, into ourselves, is that nature is the essence of beautiful indifference. Like gravity. Like the sun. Like the earthquake or the wildfire or the drought. These things are neither cruel nor loving, they merely are. And seeing them, sensing them, should remind us that we are no different. Though we build structures between us and the real world. Though we divide and separate and rift. We should remember that we have the outside within us, regardless of cities or walls. We ourselves are liminal, able to inhabit both worlds at once.”
Fellow ClimateCultures member James Murray-White is a member of XR Rewilding, which explores and advances rewilding — of the land, of the human — within the context of Extinction Rebellion. You can see a short description and video from James at Campfire Convention, and there is a public XR Rewilding group on Facebook.
A writer of ephemeral things for beautiful places, exploring the disconnect between human nature and nature nature, and grappling with themes of faith, folklore and narratology.
Photographer Oliver Raymond-Barker uses an innovative take on the camera obscura to uncover visible and invisible networks and complex histories embedded in a Scottish peninsula whose water-and-landscape is home to nuclear arsenals, peace activists and pilgrims’ spiritual traditions.
2,720 words: estimated reading time 11 minutes
Last November, I joined other artists presenting work as part of Planetary Processing, a gathering for whom photography is a mode of speculation on geological, celestial and bodily systems. I showed prints and text from my latest project, Trinity.
I created this body of work during residencies at Cove Park arts centre in Scotland, where I could engage with the unique ecology of the Rosneath peninsula: the landscape itself, the networks visible and invisible that have been imposed upon it and the complex histories embedded in its fabric.
Beneath land and water
The peninsula is dominated by the presence of HMNB Faslane and RNAD Coulport, the home of Trident, the UK’s nuclear deterrent. Existing alongside these sprawling sites are the small, temporary constructions of itinerant activists — locations such as the Peace Wood bear traces of their occupation.
Trinity references the early Christian pilgrims that voyaged to remote corners of the British Isles, such as Rosneath, in search of sanctuary; peregrini who sought to use the elemental power of nature as a means of gaining spiritual enlightenment. However, it also alludes to the contemporary use of the land — promised into the service of conflict, boundaries delineated upon the surface that pay no heed to its deep geological history.
I made these images using my own ‘backpack obscura’ — a custom-built camera obscura designed to allow me to capture large format images in remote locations. A light-tight tent, it uses rudimentary materials and a simple meniscus lens to project the desired image onto the floor of the camera. As well as being my means of image making, it also served as my shelter from the elements.
After two extended stays on the peninsula I felt I had enough material to begin the editing process. However, I soon realised that conveying the depth and breadth of what I had experienced was going to be difficult using image alone. The idea of creating a publication seemed the perfect solution as a means of expanding and extending upon my work. I feel the combination of critical and creative texts really help to locate the imagery whilst also providing a platform from which the reader can access the project.
What follows, with some of the images I took, are edited extracts from the two texts that have been provided for the book: Not Negative, an essay by Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and Trinity, writer Nick Hunt’s creative memoir of his stay in 2002 at the peace camp near to the naval base that’s home to Britain’s nuclear deterrent of three Vanguard-class submarines equipped with thermonuclear warheads, where he engaged in several direct actions against the base.
Not negative
an edited extract of an essay by Martin Barnes
Most photography deals in detail, giving the illusion of facts, and with that, an instant understanding. In contrast, these images convey in their evocative obscurity only a steadily gathering comprehension. Raymond-Barker creates a sequence of repeated motifs that gather force and meaning because of their claustrophobic insistence. Branches, foliage and sky dominate, interspersed with mountainous terrain, bodies of water, security fences and eerily empty buildings. Punctuating the procession of glimpsed black and white impressions are shocks of colour: burnt orange, butane blue and blood red. Together, these images appear like the mental flashbacks of a person who is attuned to the animal, seeking survival, hunted in the half-light. Crucial to the arresting aesthetic and meaning of Raymond-Barker’s photographs is his pairing of contemporary concerns and production with basic nineteenth-century analogue techniques, notably paper negatives, which hark back to the origins of photography. In the analogue age, the technical processes and language used to conceptualize photography inhabited a liminal and alchemical space. Unique and ‘latent’ images were formed in light-sensitive silver salts on the surface of metal, paper, glass, and later, plastics. Rituals of the darkroom allowed those images to conjure multiples in the form of positive prints emerging into the light.
In sidelining negatives to a functional and more subservient role in relation to the positive prints, the artistic and physical uniqueness of the negative remained unexploited. Yet, until they are printed, negatives contain significant untapped potential, like a charged battery waiting to be connected. Moreover, negatives are direct witnesses, actual chemical evidence, still, silent, traces and links to the time and place witnessed by the photographer and channelled onto a light-sensitive surface.
For the images in this book, Raymond-Barker created a ‘backpack obscura’, a modern portable version of the camera obscura used by artists since at least the sixteenth century. In his construction, a light-tight tent is pitched in the landscape and a 70mm lens and mirror extended outside it projecting an image of the surroundings on a white groundsheet on the floor. Once the composition is decided, in the darkness, he unrolls a sheet of resin-coated paper and places it on the floor to capture an exposure of some fifteen seconds. During the exposure, he is intent, sometimes ‘dodging’ and ‘burning’ the paper. Such methods are conventionally reserved for darkroom printing from negatives, to block or increase light in selected areas, enhancing or reducing contrast and softening edges. The tree canopy above the tent is often the natural subject. The latent image is formed on the photographic paper and will not be visible until later when he returns to process it in his darkroom in Penryn in Cornwall, many miles away. At night, he may sleep in the tent where the image he has captured on the site also lies temporarily dormant.
Some of the black and white paper negatives Raymond-Barker makes remain unique images. Others become the basis for black and white positive ‘contact prints’. However, Raymond-Barker also achieves some tints by combining his negatives with colour photographic papers and processing. He embraces as authentic and integral to the process what might conventionally be seen as faults: water damage, scratches, and uneven development and exposures.
We may intuit from the uncanny appearance of these photographs that the location they depict is a landscape full of echoes; that it holds a deep history resounding with the ominous undercurrents of the present. It enhances the work to know that these Scottish landscapes are at a location likely to have been near the sites alighted on by evangelist monks from the early Celtic church. By stark contrast, it is also the area close to the present-day Clyde nuclear submarine base at Faslane bay. It is a place of bleak and sublime natural beauty in which helicopters and police boats are reminders of an awesome destructive power that lurks beneath the water. The protesters’ nearby peace camp consists of homemade structures, humbly defiant in the face of military might.
Lines from the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney, describing a fearsome threat hiding in the woods and waters, seems apposite:
A few miles from here a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch above a mere; the overhanging bank is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface. At night there, something uncanny happens: The water burns …
Raymond-Barker opts for a similarly poetic approach in his image making and storytelling. The charge of his pictures lingers like a half-remembered dream.
He approaches from the south, a small man in a ragged robe. He comes carefully through these woods. There is no razor wire. Sunlight and shadows slide off him, spiderwebs break silently. The skeletons of dead leaves cling to his rough hair.
Behind him is the Irish Sea, cold and grey, with white-capped waves. On the rocky shoreline lies an abandoned coracle. Crabs have made their homes in it. Its willow ribs press on its skin. He will not need it now, for there is no return.
He traces the long line of the loch, stitching himself into the land. Around him is an interweave of oak and ash and pine. He picks his way through tangled thorn. There is no smooth road. Beyond the trees a wet wind blows over open water.
—
It rises up from deep below. Its shoulder breaks the surface. Water thunders from its flank. The daylight makes it gleam. For long months it has been submerged in darkness and in secrecy, nursing its destructiveness. It has seen the bottom of the world, the undersides of ice floes. Now its weight is buoyancy. It surfaces to claim the air.
Beneath what is visible is a vast shadow.
—
The call goes up just after dawn. I stumble from my tent. People are staggering around, pulling off their sleep-warm clothes. I spill coffee on myself. Someone blows a trumpet. The loch is hidden by the trees and I can’t see what the others have seen. There is something I’ve agreed to do in this eventuality but I do not know what it is. My brain is still stunned with sleep. Then I know again.
People are running to the loch. I follow without shoes. We leave the camp, cross the road and stand upon the lapping shore. There are no police around. There is no time to think. From the wet heap at my feet I select a thick black skin and drag my legs into it, heave it over my chest and arms, being flayed in reverse. It is clammy, tight and cold. Its smell is like an old tomb. We wade into icy water clad in neoprene.
He passes dwellings in the trees. Bivouacs and benders. Turf-roofed huts and tents. The camps of charcoal burners. Through the smoke he glimpses them, the gentle outcasts of these woods. Those who fled from villages. Those who are misshapen. He sees them gathered by their fires telling stories, singing songs. He blesses them as he walks by. They do not notice him.
Behind him are the gilded robes that he shed for plain sackcloth. His hand exchanged a crosier for a staff of blackthorn.
These woodlands end against the shore and he walks the pebble beach, the wind harsh upon his skin, following the undulating highlands with his eye. A seabird turns in the air. There is a stink of wrack. He could build a chapel here but something tells him to walk on, away from the long water with its access to the sea. He does not trust those depths. That shadow in the water.
—
The grey waves part on either side of its gliding topmost fin and join again behind, leaving no trace of its passing. It monstrous mass keeps pace below. Seabirds keep their distance. As it slides towards its home it scans the confines of this sound, reading depths and distances, alert to any obstacle. Its brutal, sleek intelligence seems evolved and not designed.
In its wake, a flying machine hangs and buzzes watchfully.
There were glaciers here once that tore strips from the land. Then the sea flooded in. It travels in their absence.
—
The first steps into coldness hurt, the next ones not so much. The water grips my legs, my thighs, my chest. I start to paddle. At first we cluster in a bunch but soon the swimmers scatter out. Spectators gather on the shore, shouting exhortations.
The low horizon of the hills goes up and down beyond the waves. Small waves slap against my mouth. I concentrate on breathing. The water feels very dense, made sluggish by the cold. This is not my element. The distance feels hopeless.
Far out, a noisy helicopter turns slow circles in the sky. It must be half a mile away. Below it I can see the shape of something great and dark.
He wanders enraptured, ruptured. The sunlight breaks upon him. On the shore he falls to his knees with the immensity and stares upon the awesome light that floods the shadows of the world. The god of love is everywhere. It is all a marvel. He closes his dazzled eyes and the world appears in negative, the black sky and the white trees, the incandescent veins of leaves, the bleached water opening to some great revelation. A vision flashes in his mind of blank structures on the shore, hard-edged and unknowable, working to some vast and terrible design. The revelation fills him but he cannot understand it. When he opens his eyes again, everything is as it is. The trees, the stones, the small waves are fixed in their positions.
—
It registers nothing of these things. Nothing penetrates. Its mind, if it has a mind, is as blank as a stone. It has almost reached its home. Its velocity starts to slow.
—
We doggy-paddle, thankful but defeated, back towards the land. As I focus on the shore I see a man stooping there. Water flows from his cupped hands. He gazes somehow through me. I think about solid ground, warm clothes, a welcome fire. When I look again he is no longer there.
Planetary Processing took the form of a six-month artist-led peer forum, funded by Artquest and hosted by The Photographers’ Gallery, London.
A fully designed mock-up of Oliver’s photobook, Trinity, was shortlisted in the 2019 Kassel Dummy Award. “This year we again invited all photographers worldwide to take part and to send us their unpublished photobook mock-up. In total, 362 photobooks from 37 countries from all over the world were sent in.” The book will travel around the world for the next six months for various exhibitions.
The book was designed by Loose Joints: “For this sprawling publication we used an interplay of papers, sizes and colours to re-structure Barker’s immersive images, which are made using a backpack-mounted camera obscura to make and print photographs in situ. The result is a swirling mixture of tones and sensations…”
In his essay, Martin Barnes says, “There is something powerfully primal about Oliver Raymond-Barker’s most recent photographs. Passages of flaring light, blurred boundaries and hard shadows mix with vaporous swirls and smudges. They give the impression of an eye-opening from slumber onto a world that is not yet fully formed, a realm that is intuited rather than understood … Raymond-Barker’s artistic practice is linked to the early experimental phase of photography, reclaiming the negative as an idea as much as an image that immediately conveys something familiar yet otherworldly. In this and earlier work he is primarily concerned with the intersection between history and landscape. His method is to embed himself in a specific location … by walking on a lone pilgrimage. He allows time and the alternative ‘camera-less’ photographic methods he employs to open up ideas and issues in the terrain, a working practice that he describes as ‘getting to the core of a place’. … His subject is the atmosphere of the place, its spiritual history across time, and an uneasy combination of awe in nature with the nascent threat of an unfathomable destructive force.”
Nick Hunt (a fellow ClimateCultures Member) adds in a note to his piece that “St. Modan, the son of an Irish chieftain, renounced his position as an abbot to live as a hermit in the 6th century. His relics are kept at Rosneath Church on the shore of Gare Loch.”
The full texts of Martin’s and Nick’s pieces, Not Negative and Trinity respectively, are available at Oliver’s website. Oliver’s previous post for ClimateCultures, Beyond Tongues: Into the Animist Language of Stone, explores his encounter — on a climb in a Welsh slate quarry — with a world beyond our normal modes of communication and a route away from modern separatist language.
In his essay, Martin Barnes refers to the Anglo Saxon poem Beowulf, the account of that hero’s encounters with the monster Grendel, who terrorised humanity from his lair beneath the shadowy mere. For a discussion on an alternative imagining of Grendel and Beowulf and the perilous meeting of worlds, see Bringing Our Monsters Back Home, my review of John Gardner’s 1971 novel, Grendel.
An artist using photography in its broadest sense - analogue and digital process, natural materials and camera-less methods of image making - to explore our relationship to nature.
Writer and photographer Mike Hembury read Deborah Tomkins’ post on how grief and hope feature in the work of fellow ‘climate writers’, and shares a poem in response to his own research into these experiences under climate change.
960 words: estimated reading time 4 minutes
Sweeping the Dust
For so long I have been Searching, Sweeping the dust, Hurting, Hurting, big time, Living alone With you In a world Of wounds.
People Are not who they were, I am not Who I was.
And all the while Blaming Who else but myself, Feeling shame And bitter failure While sweeping the dust.
I’m homesick. But I’m still here.
I understand That I am grieving That we are grieving, As our landscapes Lose their meaning: “Is this how you feel?” Yes.
We are sick now. Sick of watching The world crumble and burn Sick of Sweeping the dust, Witnessing The reduction Of our more-than-human Earth To the smoke and ash, Algae and pollution Of human dominion. Filthy, defiled By greed and lucre.
However I want you to know I am not Submitting to despair.
I am sweeping the dust.
There is much grief work To be done. Much grief work To share. And much of it Will be hard. But we have More than enough To go around.
We are allowed to feel now We give ourselves permission To grieve.
Our depths Are well-springs. Our tears Balm, Co-elixir.
We share the dust, our wounds, Our denuded landscapes And each sharing, A seed: Resilience. Our job now Not hope But becoming hope For worlds to come.
Close the valve Hold the window open Plant the seed Sweep the dust.
Grief and hope
This poem came to me while I was researching the topic of ‘climate grief’ for a longer magazine piece. I must say that it is a recurrent theme for me. I am a great believer in action, and the need to stay motivated, but I also think that it is vitally important for us to feel the immense sadness and loss that is increasingly part of our common experience on our wonderful planet. Despair can be immensely debilitating but, to be honest, I think it is also part of a broader awakening.
I was very heartened to discover a number of very moving articles, particularly:
Hope and Mourning in the Anthropocene– Understanding Ecological Grief, by Neville Ellis and Ashlee Cunsolo
How to keep going, by Emily Johnston
The Best Medicine for My Climate Grief, by Peter Kalmus
The Road to Resilience, from the American Psychological Association.
Explicit thanks are due here to Neville Ellis and Ashlee Cunsolo, who I hope will forgive me for turning their essay into something of a collage.
Grief and hope in the face of environmental crisis Photograph: Tim Hayes/Ende Gelände 2018: Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Whilst looking into the topic of grief I have also been questioning the role of hope, and am indebted to Emily Johnston’s take on this, which is that our own hope, or lack of it, is almost irrelevant right now. Our job is to be hope, to embody hope, for future generations. A very powerful message.
I have also just discovered Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark, which has been inspirational, to put it mildly. Rebecca distinguishes between the false hope of “it will all turn out alright in the end”, and the need to cast ourselves into the uncertainty of action:
“Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.”
I was also greatly impressed by Carolyn Baker, in her interview with the Canadian Ecopsychology Network. She stresses the importance of accepting grief, of actually feeling grief, as a precursor to moving forward, and to feeling joy. She essentially posits that to feel grief is far better than its alternative, which is to remain in denial, and feel nothing.
My wild emotional journey this week into the depths of climate grief and the associated search for reasons to continue was rounded off in the most succinct way possible by Greta Thunberg’s speech to a demonstration at COP24 in Katowice. She managed to sum up my thinking in two sentences:
“Once we start to act, hope is everywhere, so instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then and only then, hope will come.”
Find out more
You can explore the various sources that Mike mentions:
And of course, Deborah Tomkins’ post Grief, Hope and Writing Climate Change — where she brings in her own experience as a writer and that of fellow members of Bristol Climate Writers — is here at ClimateCultures. The post is illustrated by artist Perrin Ireland’s images from her graphic story Climate Grief, the emotional reality of global warming.
A writer, musician and photographer, with a regular column on climate change, whose novel, New Clone City (2018), features environmental themes in an urban setting.
Poet Clare Crossman follows the first six of her illustrated poems on nature and climate change with the second of two selections from In the Blackthorn Time and other poems, her collaboration with artist Victor Ibanez, including Naturalist.
1,300 words: estimated reading time: 5 minutes
The first selection of Clare’s illustrated poems is included in her previous post, In the Blackthorn Time.
Clare’s first post for ClimateCultures, In the Blackthorn Time, featured the first six of her sequence poems: The Window, The Pear Tree, The Violets, A Triolet, Marmora Road in Summer, and In the Blackthorn Time. Gold Finches, Naturalist, Cabbage White Butterfly, June at Docwra’s Manor, Solstice and Burlton’s Farm complete the sequence, and all twelve collages are for sale. The collection is framed and available for exhibition display on request. You can contact Clare via her website.
Clare Crossman’s pamphlet Landscapes won the Redbeck competition in 1997 and since then she has published three collections of poetry, Going Back (Firewater Press, Cambridge), The Shape of Us and Vanishing Point (Shoestring Press, Nottingham). A third collection Common Ground is due in autumn 2018. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies. She performed and wrote Fen song: A Ballad on the Fen in 2006 with the singer-songwriter Penny Mclaren Walker.
Victor Ibanez trained in Fine Art at Art School in Kent. He has worked in graphic design, advertising and television. He is currently a member of Cambridge Art Salon and has facilitated many arts events during The Romsey Festival, in the Mill Road and Romsey areas of Cambridge, in collaboration with Ruthie Collins at Art Salon and Nick Hall at Vinopolis. Victor runs a regular life drawing class. You can see more of his work at his Facebook page.
A Triolet was included in a short film by Jonnie Howard about the first Pivotal Festival in Empty Common, Cambridge. Goldfinches was commended in The Barn Owl Competition, Devon. The Window was recorded for Fen Song A Ballad of the Fen. And Clare reads a number of these poems and others in The Pear Tree, a film by Victor Ibanez, which you can find at his YouTube channel.
A poet with a background in theatre, collaborations with an illustrator and a songwriter, and practical and creative engagements with local landscapes and nature.
