DORSET COAST

I live close to the remarkable Jurassic Coast…a good deal of work here has been prompted by encounters in it…

Company of Birds

bird brain

hollow-boned go-between visitor to every bush that ever lived winged instrument

bright-eye seasonal songster swift one communal chorister

air magician hopper along edges forager in hedges

‘in-burrow-under-water-on-thermal’

bird brain

SENSING PLACE

‘A glimpse into the processes and practices involved in cultivating relationship with the places I work with.’

BEACH CANVAS for Frances Hatch

She is open to the open air -

a painter kneeling

on bonfire-blackened shingle

mixed with debris the sea has tossed up.

Rain won’t deter her.

Quite the contrary:

it too will be something to hand,

softening surfaces, seeping in.

She works with stuff

that is all a meeting and a mixing:

greensand, gault, lias

this present moment

with geological ages

on the Jurassic coast.

Paint encounters earth

fallen from cliffs,

plant life, flotsam, all

the material makings of place.

As she anchors her canvas

with a rock and light flashes

where the cliff torn with a fall

catches the sun, I want to tell her

what her art means to me.

I could put it simply

and it would be true.

What she brings me into,

quickened with imagination,

is the living world.

But is that enough?

We need words that glow with inner light:

Words that come with a touch

of life that makes them what they are –

life of flesh and spirit,

and not with colour daubed on,

but with the inner glow

that is energy,

the vibrant flower

and the mud it grows in.

What she reveals,

what I seek to speak of,

is place renewed,

broken shore and wave breaking

here, at this moment, all the instability

of the land we live on and love.

Jeremy Hooker. June 2023

included in PRELUDES poems by Jeremy Hooker. Shearsman Books 2024