A new exhibition at the National Poetry Library celebrates 75 years since the 1951 Festival of Britain and the inauguration of the Southbank Centre.
Poetry Buildings includes one of my first books After Light, a collaboration with the photographer Paula Naughton. Paula and I met while working at The New York Center for Book Arts, and this was an early edition for the AM BRUNO project. In a previous post on this blog, I wrote that Paula’s strength as an artist lay in “an impetuous, sharp intelligence” and readers of The Library of Ice may recognise her in the person of “Claire”, who is instrumental in my decision to depart London for Greenland. “I turned my attention from optics to ice. From light to darkness…”
After Light (photograph above by Sarah Bodman) examines the variety of ways in which light moves and the art of photography: refraction, reflection, absorption, irradiance and diffraction. I responded to Paula's photographs by writing about scientific endeavour and empirical wonder: five lyric poems and five “poetic equations” finding emotional equivalents for the scientific terms. The poems are printed in the most ancient of book forms, a scroll, and the more recent technology of a slide viewer displays Paula’s photographs of an abandoned building in Ireland. It’s a pleasure to see this book brought back out from the library's rare books archive and I am grateful to Chris McCabe and Emily Wood at the National Poetry Library for the care they have taken in presenting the work.
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After Light, text by Nancy Campbell |
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After Light, photograph by Paula Naughton |
