colva books

31 hill pond

2011-05-09T16:16:00.000-07:00

march 11

154mm x 184mm

18 pages

What started out as 'sixteen photographs' (see below) transmuted into 'hill pond', without any photographs, which became ever less necessary to the project. In fact, the booklet - descriptions of a winter of visits to a hill pond about 40 minutes' walk away, from October 30th to to the first day of skylark song on the hill, on February 12th - underwent a process of ever greater simplification. Its concessions to decoration are now limited to its pale blue-green wrapper that references the colour of a lichen that I regularly found on my walks, and the colour of the title itself, that of dark winter heather. Full stops in the seventeen pieces of writing somehow went missing along the way too, replaced instead by gaps in the text, which hopefully have the function of regulating the pace at which they can be read. Unsurprisingly, these descriptions are as much about the sky and the wind as they are about the pond. Reading them again I am transported entirely to the moments of their birth, to certain patterns of cloud or conditions of light, as well as the curious newt that settled itself in a couple of inches away and watched me as I crouched by the pond to write the very first piece and a chill settled in from that morning's rain.

artesian

2010-12-21T09:38:00.001-08:00

The third issue of Artesian, from Go Together Press, is now out and is a beautiful addition to the series. Following issues based around Earth and Water, its theme is Time, and features writing by John Berger, Jan Svankmajer, Ry Cooder, Bill Morrison and Tilda Swinton, among others. I have two pieces included, one a reflection on rock painting, the other a poem on Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence.

buds

2010-12-21T06:04:00.000-08:00

Andrew Morrison of Two Wood Press recently printed up 40 copies of this lovely letterpress and woodcut print. The print was a collaboration - the words are mine from a series of 2009 garden writings, the woodcuts his. The print measures roughly 37cm x 59cm and the colour of the twigs in the print is actually more of a velvety taupe than this reproduction shows. There are copies spare so do get in touch if you are interested in one.

31 sixteen photographs

2010-12-21T05:47:00.000-08:00

Despite reasonable assumptions based on its title, there are in fact no photographs in this one (well, maybe one, at the end), which is instead made up of a number of descriptions of the same place - a small hill pond about 40 minutes walk away which I have been visiting at different times and in different weathers over the past six weeks or so. After a while, the exercise - which started out through a dissatisfaction with both the ease and limitations of photography - moved into the area of questions about originality and repetition in a series of written descriptions, considerations which I am still working through. The pieces also serve as a meditation on what photography cannot show.

30 shepherd in the trees

2010-04-24T16:14:00.001-07:00

april 2010

8 page hand-stitched booklet sealed with thistle paper

11 photographs in plant paper wrapper

The phenomenon of 'spirit photography', arising during the 1860s and lasting well into the twentieth century, was formed through the combination of photographic practitioners, intoxicated with the possibilities of the new medium - as well as the money-making opportunities it presented - eager to suggest that they could indeed fix spiritual emanations on film, and a credulous public, whose amazement at the possibilities of fixing images at all led them to desire the camera to see what they no longer could. Many were comforted in their grief; just as many were sceptical.

However, a core of cases remain in which the photographers were seeking neither fame nor pecuniary gain, but who felt that by chance they had come across something that revealed an uncanny and hitherto hidden mystery of life. One of the most interesting of these men was Alan Broadrick, parson of the New Forest parish of Bramshaw between 1896-1904, and whose archive of notes, an intermittent diary and a large photographic album is now held in Lyndhurst's Museum of New Forest Life.

In Broadrick's case the question is not so much the veracity of the pictures - the original silver-gelatin photographs are beyond doubt genuine and bear no traces of having been tampered with - but rather his interpretation of their contents. For he believed that the photographs showed figures of good and evil among us, attending on our every move.

Shepherd in the Trees: A Bramshaw Parson presents excerpts from Broadrick's diary, and reproduces photographs from the original album that so stimulated his imagination.

29 a bestiary

2010-04-24T16:07:00.001-07:00

april 2010

in progress

The diaries of William Greenwood, 7^th Earl of Monmouth (1687-1731), a keen amateur of the natural sciences, are a remarkable source for some of the more outlandish theories and experiments of his day. In 1730 he describes how, ‘being desirous of improving my nocturnall sight’, he rubbed his eyelids and chest twice daily with an unguent derived from a boiled-up owl. He confessed that ‘the ointment do smelle so ranke that I fear me the attentions of pie-dogs of the shire,’ adding that he masked the odour to some degree with the addition of lavender water. No improvement to his night vision seems to have been effected however, and the experiment is not mentioned after its initial two weeks. The Earl died the following year from a chill caught in an experiment in which he was engaged with testing the efficacy of whale grease as a barrier to the cold.

28 la vallée des merveilles

2009-08-23T14:02:00.000-07:00

august 09

148mm x 210mm

poems inside flapped pocket with blind embossing

The thousands of rock engravings that surround Mt Bégo, in the Vallée des Merveilles in south-eastern France, are a comparative rarity in that, rather than being produced by a prehistoric hunter-gathering community, instead come from Bronze Age farmers; hence the occurrence in the engravings of metal implements such as ploughs and daggers. I have tried to capture this difference in emphasis in the two poems enclosed here, La Vallée des Merveilles and La Voie Sacrée. The cover design is a blind embossing of one of the engravings from the area.

27 scuggery or 'I wish I had a sister like Ruth'

2009-08-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

august 09

120mm x 180mm

36 pages

24 copies

A piece occasioned by the chance find of the 1917 'Chatterbox' annual of stories for schoolchildren. Reading a number of its tales I had the impression that I was actually reading a collection of themes, to which the characters were more or less incidental. Most feature a challenge to a boy or girl's mettle, whether this arrives in the form of adapting to a new school, rescuing a sleepwalker, or journeying through the Canadian muskeg. Hence Scuggery is collated from the original writings entirely on the basis of themes, to which place, situation, character and gender are fully interchangeable.

flowers (cards)

2009-08-15T14:51:00.000-07:00

march 09

55mm x 76mm

printed wrapper, silk flowers

Ten of the flowers that I wrote about in Colva Books 17, Flowers, appeared as embroidered silk flowers that were given away with Wix's Kensitas cigarettes in 1934-35. As these silks are still readily available I printed up a few of their folders with my own text replacing the botanical history and cultural notes that appeared in the originals and slipped the silks inside.

26 and i begin to rise...

2008-08-25T02:32:00.001-07:00

august 08

90mm x 90mm

hand-painted, silk-lined wrapper

mini cd

edition of 12

A recording of the writing from Large Blue. The design on the cover depicts comfrey, which, in the butterfly's hibernation dream is the plant that provokes the crisis from which it must rise to wakefulness or else remain in threatened dormancy.

25 large blue

2008-08-25T02:20:00.000-07:00

july 2008

135mm x 180mm

8 pages

printed wrappers

edition of 24

The writing in Large Blue is based on the life-cycle of the butterfly of that name. It is an astounding natural history that reads like an otherwise unrecorded myth, and I was interested to see how its themes might transpose to human terms and society. The final short pieces record various appearances, appropriately fleeting, drawn from the larger narrative. As is evident from the cover, the book aspires to the condition of total immersion into an environment, even to the state of invisibility. The book's wrapper is made from JMW Turner's Blue, a cotton, linen and hemp paper from Ruscombe Paper Mill, manufactured to replicate a paper that the painter used in the 1820s for his watercolours. It is the perfect paper to represent the sky which is such an important element in the writing. The first section of Large Blue appears in issue one of Artesian magazine, alongside writing by John Berger, Jan Svankmajer and Anne Michaels.

24 the clergyman

2008-05-21T15:33:00.000-07:00

may 2008

136mm x 171mm

12 pages, sewn, wrappers

ink drawing on cover

The Clergyman originally appeared in The Great Impediment Valve and Other Stories, but I liked it enough to want to print it up separately. Mischievously, given the rather sinister nature of the central character, the book's outer wrappers are Victorian bible endpapers, and these are garlanded with a crown of laurel, the victor's crown.

23 to draw poultry

2008-05-21T14:56:00.000-07:00

december 2007

150mm x 197mm

6 pages, wrapper

Reading Isabella Beeton's instructions on how to draw poultry I wondered how easily her words could be followed today with instructions such as cut off the pinions, take out the crop and make a deep straight cut across the body between the tail and the vent. I decided there was some fun to be had with this. So, the first method in this book is Beeton's own. The remaining three are anagrams of this first method, and whose instructions veer between probable, improbable and downright impossible. However, because the vocabulary of the three pieces is entirely Beeton's, they have a straightforward conviction of command that lends their incomprehensibility a bewildering clarity. The illustrations that accompanied the original instructions have been similarly treated. Now, scrape the skin pinions...

22 horses

2008-05-21T00:22:00.000-07:00

november 2006

146mm x 178mm

22 pages, with bookmark

16 copies

I know the horses come down in the night. What started life as a number of observations on local weather turned into a re-imagining of Colva and its community after an undefined post-catastrophic event, when its isolation has become even more pronounced. The horses of the title are noticeable by their absence. Their only direct appearance is in the far distance, the white stallion lit by the evening sun, on the bookmark in the book's pages. Their health and vitality have left our lands.

21 kolofana poems (for jehane)

2008-03-21T16:51:00.000-07:00

june 2006

124mm x 186mm

8 pages, printed clear film wrap, slipcased

12 copies

Six poems written while staying at Jehane's house in Kolofana, Amorgos, in July and August 2004. The photograph on the slipcase was taken from the inside of a hermit's cell, built in rocks overlooking the sea on the north side of the island. I had remembered it from a visit years before, with its channelling of water into a small rock sink in the corner and the gathering of thorny brush that served as a mattress on the rock shelf bed. More than anything though, I remembered looking through the window and seeing nothing but two types of blue - of the sky and the sea. It was a vision of perfection that I held in my mind for years, and always determined to one day return to it. When I did so, I was amazed to see the outline of an island on the horizon. Someone must have out it there in the meantime.

20 the great impediment valve & other stories

2008-03-21T16:41:00.000-07:00

april 2006

148mm x 210mm

28 pages, printed cover

24 copies

Four stories written in 2005-06 - The Great Impediment Valve, The Handsome Senior Administrator, The Baggage Carrier and The Clergyman. The basic mechanics of the stories were the lists of homophones, homonyms and word definitions extracted from the four source texts, to which these stories otherwise bear no relation. The only rule was that the extracted words needed to be used in the same order for the new stories, which took me, and the characters, in directions they wouldn't otherwise have taken. Which was precisely the point. In this regard, it's worth quoting Harry Mathews from his foreword to Immeasurable Distances, in which he says: "The written word, like the languages of the other arts, constitutes a predetermined, autonomous system. The primacy of subject matter, or 'depth', is a distracting cultural illusion - there exists only surface and a reader bringing awareness to bear on it. In terms of the age-old poetic tradition of truth-telling, writing the truth means not representation but invention."

19 three painted caves

2008-03-21T16:28:00.000-07:00

december 2005

156mm x 218mm

4 loose sheets in flapped folder

12 copies

Three poems from 2005, inspired by visits to three painted subterranean caves in France - Grottes de Gargas, Grotte de Villars and Cavernes de Niaux. Each cave has its own unique characteristics and atmosphere which gave rise to these meditations: in Gargas there is the low rock ceiling, in Villars there are faint calcite accretions of millennia covering the paintings, and in Niaux there is the resonant central chamber, deep within the cave and only reached after a kilometre or so of walking. Pasted inside the folder is tracing paper holding a faint impression of one of the poems, taken from the ink bleeding through wet paper. The action of water plays such a large part in what remains of paintings in the caves that this was appropriate. The impression is faint - we can just make out a few words - which is also just about our present understanding of rock painting from a distance of thirty thousand years or more, and that thanks to the work of people such as David Lewis-Williams, of the meaning and purpose of the images in the caves.

18 the concert

2008-03-21T16:18:00.001-07:00

july 2005

148mm x 210mm

8 pages

4 copies

Contains The Concert, The Cove, The Lighted Path and The Cabaret/The Violinist. The first piece is a factual report of a concert given by a neighbour, a young violinist, one evening at a nearby 14th century church. The other pieces in the collection are based upon this initial piece of reportage. All take its themes and objects and present them in new ways, so for example, a bat that flew over the heads of the waiting audience becomes, in The Lighted Path, a tune on a piccolo before the main piece of music. Likewise, the violinist drying her hand on her black taffeta dress becomes, in The Cove, a woman drying herself with a towel on the beach.

17 flowers

2008-03-19T16:49:00.000-07:00

december 2004

150mm x 200mm

14 pages, Japanese paper endpapers, orange wrappers

24 copies

Twelve intimate portraits in words, of different flowers. The portraits follow the seasons, from snowdrops and primroses through to teasels and jasmine, and were written gradually over a couple of years, beginning with thoughts about nasturtiums that came one day unbidden in the garden. the colour of the cover comes from a line in 'Lilies': Those of you who come close enough we will dust with our golden pollen.

16 gousse (plus)

2008-03-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

may 2004

148mm x 210mm

4 pages, printed cover

6 copies

A response to the unexpected gift of the d'Antin Mss - Mots d'Heures: Gousse, Rames, which since its publication in 1966 has proved an enigma to scholars and amateurs alike. This publication appends three poems sourced from a recent find in the British Library, of three loose leaves tucked into the uncut pages of a second edition of Denis Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste, and which were found to be of the same paper (Canson et Montgolfier, watermarked 1788) as the original Mots d'Heures. Uniquely, as well as two pieces in French, a poem written in English was found, whose subject matter distinguishing the writer as a well-versed (or at least well-travelled) person. The three new poems are presented with explanatory footnotes.

15 stephen & susan

2008-03-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

october 2003

186mm x 124mm

2 pages, hand-stitched

4 copies

A booklet for a friend to illustrate a birthday poem written by a 75 year-old Dominican friar to his 68 year-old cousin, telling her not to fear the old age into which she is growing.

Growing old? We bear it.

with quiet joy, we bear it.

14 receipts from eliza acton

2008-03-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

september 2003

148mm x 210mm

12 pages, hand-stitched, painted cover

12 copies

An eight course meal derived from recipes featured in Eliza Acton's classic 1845 book, Modern Cookery for Private Families, to which the Oulipian rule of n+7 (replacing a noun, or in this case an ingredient, with one 7 nouns/ingredients on in the dictionary/index) has been applied. As a result of the transformations the receipts are frankly indigestible. Eliza Acton's language however, remains characteristically eloquent.

13 two weeks in may

2008-03-19T16:25:00.000-07:00

july 2003

210mm x 148mm

9 pages, hand-stitched

3 copies

A record of two weeks in May, 1997, when I looked after a hill farm belonging to friends in the Black Mountains in Wales. lambing was over and they had taken a well-deserved holiday, leaving me alone with the task of feeding 500 sheep, a dozen chickens, three cats and two dogs for a fortnight. The may blossom was heavy that year.

12 the what’s the hen’s (for jehane)

2008-03-19T16:14:00.000-07:00

june 2003

148mm x 210mm

10 pages, hand-stitched, illustrated

2 copies

A miscellany of writing from 2002-03 made as a gift for Jehane for her yearly visit from Amorgos. The booklet is illustrated with 'animporphs', ie: rusty implements ransacked from the shed and utterly ruinous for the scanner, but that will certainly have a later booklet devoted to them. The short piece on the cover is a tickler for anyone with apostrophe troubles.

11 cricket

2008-03-19T15:48:00.000-07:00

may 2003

218mm x 154mm

15 pages, hand-stitched, hardcover

12 copies

A conjunction of pictures, courtesy of the remnants of a photographic manual c.1906, of cricketers demonstrating the techniques for playing various strokes, allied with words from publications such as The Story of the World in Pictures (1934), The Books of Knowledge and Savage Habits and Customs, and descriptions found on the backs of the cigarette card series, Anstie's People of Africa and People of Asia (both 1926) and Player's British Empire Series (1904). The persistence of casual, insidious racist stereotyping in these sources, and the certainty with which the bigotry and prejudices of colonialism are stated, find an appropriate counterpoint in the strokes of cricketers pummelling balls to the boundary.

10 24 vacuous straplines

2008-03-08T08:59:00.014-08:00

january 2003

210mm x 150mm

22 pages, clear film cover, screw bound

12 copies

A collection of 24 banal straplines - Wear.Share; Truly Global; Time, and Again; We are You etc. They may be already in use, maybe not - it makes no difference at all, they are all utterly meaningless. The booklet came from a feeling of being assaulted with stupid slogans after living far away from such things for a few years. The pictures are from 1960s issues of National Geographic, and all depict great bounty or its promise.

09 tomatoes

2008-03-08T08:48:00.000-08:00

january 2003

148mm x 210mm

12 pages, with linocut of plum tomato on title page

24 copies

A collection of twenty interlinked situations, all written to include a mention in some form of an object usually unassimilable into a narrative with any degree of subtlety, a tomato, in a relatively unobtrusive way.

08 still (lingering dreams on waking in the dog days)

2008-03-08T08:43:00.000-08:00

october 2002

140mm x 176mm

36 pages, stapled

12 copies

July and August 2003 were remarkably still considering our exposed position 1300 feet up in the Welsh borders, where strong gusting winds and an almost constant breeze are far more usual. It was the almost unnatural stillness of the day that actually woke me one morning and gave me the idea for this booklet (designed to recall a tear-off calendar), in which the very first noise on waking is allied to the images of any dreams that may have lingered in my mind.

07 ostende

2008-03-08T08:35:00.000-08:00

august 2002

146mm x 92mm

14 page postcard book

12 copies

A little homage to the underappreciated artefact of the postcard book. This one is based on a postcard book of Ostende in the 1920s. The original blue-tinted photographs have an astounding depth and clarity of detail that allowed me to wander around in the pictures, picking out overlooked stories and details at will - boys standing around in a strange still life on a beach, a child following a black-clad lady through the streets as if she is following fate, dogs in a Tatiesque situation with their owners. The sharpness of the images meant I could create a perfectly adequate new postcard-sized image from a scene that was perhaps only 5mm square in the original.

06 invoice

2008-03-02T14:21:00.000-08:00

july 2002

210mm x 148mm

7 pages of the very thinnest office paper, stapled

24 copies

A rack of office labels in a stationery shop told an increasingly anguished tale of unrequited love (eg: 'This account is much overdue. Please remit.). Here, they inspired five sonnets, presented in the form of an invoice book to the ungrateful lover.

05 driving south

2008-03-02T14:17:00.000-08:00

july 2002

104mm x 74mm

12 pages concertina style

12 copies

In June 2002 I accompanied a friend and his dog on a long drive south to Sanlucar de Barremeda in Spain, where he was to commence a new chapter of his life with his family. These are a few of the pointers along the way, from a hoopoe in a northern French supermarket car park, through the cherries in the Valle de Jerte and the first olive trees to chalk tallies on stainless steel bar tops in Sanlucar.

04 awash

2008-03-02T14:11:00.000-08:00

june 2002

212mm x 150mm

21 pages, hand-stitched, etching on cover

24 copies

A collection of writing based around fourteen three-line metaphors for the state of dreaming. Various transformations were applied to these originals - extraction of words, recombinations of situations etc, until the final pieces in the book, their conscious input greatly reduced, were far more dreamlike than those at the beginning.

03 six translations of the top by kafka

2008-03-02T14:04:00.000-08:00

may 2002

148mm x 210mm

16 pages, stapled

24 copies

Six translations, in English, of an English translation of Franz Kafka's short story The Top. The new translations take various forms. One is written to correspond with the same syllable pattern of the original (translation), one to the grammatical structure, one to both grammar and syllable pattern, one is a complete anagram of the original, etc. At their best, the new versions comment on the original story in surprisingly elucidatory ways.

02 advice!

2008-03-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

february 2002

108mm x 88mm

flapped packet with 12 flash cards

12 copies

A little packet of banal advice in the form of motivational cliches (Lay your cards on the table! Stand up and be counted!). I can imagine no situation in which these would be even remotely useful.

01 climbing rose

2008-02-20T14:36:00.000-08:00

november 2001

130mm x 174mm, 4 pages, unique copy

The climbing rose, a Dorothy Perkins, had been on the side of the shed for decades and was a great favourite with my mother. She received the news that I had cut it hard back while she was in hospital with great suspicion, certain that I had ruined it. She died before it flowered that year, as abundantly as ever, the new growth and tangle of interwoven stems a parallel to the cancer that had spread and bloomed through her leg.

The climbing rose flowered on June the eighteenth.

I cut it hard back while you were away

cut out its tangle and trailing stems;

on returning you had eyed the work cautiously

but the rose began to bud and thicken

and now, as every year, its flowers

pink and profuse, cluster the shed.