Proviso

proviso

This is the text of the talk I gave at the launch of proviso 

at the Small Publishers Fair, London, on 6 November 2015

More information on proviso here

In 2010 I travelled to Greenland. I ended up leaving a word behind there. I’ve tried to get through the last five years without it. It’s a common word, without an obvious alternative, so occasionally I have to reorder my sentences in a convoluted manner to get around the fact it’s not there any more.

Why do this? Partly, it was a promise I had made. Before I left the UK I stayed with my good friends Frances and Nicolas McDowall who run the Old Stile Press in the Welsh Borders. It was December, and snow fell until their house was surrounded by deep snowdrifts. We joked that it was probably unnecessary for me to go to Greenland - there was enough ice and snow on our doorstep. It was like the trial runs polar expeditions used to go on: I practised all the activities I had planned for the Arctic, such as writing in the snow with maple syrup, and allowing the lines of sugar to harden into candy. When I finally left Frances and Nicolas inundated me with things I might need on my travels. I don’t remember when they concocted the scheme to give me a word to take away with me. Perhaps over a glass of Campari by the fire in the evening.

This word had been letterpress printed at the press several years before as part of a commission: a keepsake for a grand dinner held by a major media organisation. It is a beautiful piece of typography, though modest in size. But after printing was complete, the organisation changed its strategy, and the McDowalls were left with a large edition of these words, which lay forgotten in their attic.

Anyone who has trained as a letterpress printer or typefounder, who has cast type from molten lead, tin and antimony, and then set and printed it by hand, will understand how language begins to grow concrete in the process. I have often adapted my texts according to the number of sorts I had in the typecase, for example. In Greenland, by contrast, my experience of language was the reverse of physical. This is an oral culture, where for many years words were passed on in songs and stories, and never written down. As a writer, I found this historical lack of textual authority challenging. The original Danish missionaries did too: when they came to Greenland in the 18th century they introduced printing, despite the problems presented by using ink in freezing temperatures. But does printing ensure a language’s survival? Soon Danish was the first language of the nation, and by 2010 West Greenlandic was accorded vulnerable status on the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.  

In Upernavik I got to thinking about the English words I had, valuable words to me, that were useless in Greenland, and thinking about the words that the Greenlanders were using. I began to gain a few Greenlandic words and I realised if I stayed there long enough I’d probably lose some English ones.

In Greenlandic a single word can express concepts that other languages tiptoe around with a phrase. I was delighted to discover that on waking up in the morning I could say nuannarpoq rather than ‘I am full of a delirious joy in being alive’. Or illisiverupa, which means ‘to put something away in a safe place and be unable to find it again’. As I grew accustomed to densely-woven Greenlandic, with its small alphabet of only 19 letters and polysynthetic words, I began to find English finicky and prim in contrast. As though they were knucklebones used in a game of dice, I shook up tiny English words and scattered them before my audience, having little influence on the score.

The Greenlandic language has always been haunted by absences. When spoken, the suffixes are uttered so softly that an untrained ear cannot hear them. Verbs accrue morphemes, while nouns tend to disappear. It was once customary to name people after objects, but since a taboo forbade reference to the dead, the favoured objects were repeatedly renamed. The original names/words were never used again. The power of such words is not diminished by their absence from the vocabulary.  

proviso documents an intervention I undertook at Upernavik Museum as part of my investigation of lost languages. A clause in my contract as Writer in Residence read ‘Visual artists must leave a work behind in the museum, but writers are not required to do so.’

This proviso irked me a little. I understood that it was merely a reflection of the lack of prestige accorded the written word in Greenland, the preference for visual media. Needless to say, it was liberating to be excused from producing any work during the residency. However, it seemed strange that I should be exempted on account of working with language, when the Greenlandic language had proved such a rich resource for me. It set me to wondering how I might circumvent the rule and leave something verbal behind. Something not too obtrusive, something that no one would have to read. (I was thinking of the environmental caveat - variously attributed - ‘take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footsteps’.)

So I decided to leave behind just one word. Luckily I had a manifestation of language handy, in the form of the printed fragment created by Frances and Nicolas! I decided to not only leave the paper behind, but also excise the word from my language, so that I would never be able to use it again. It is a word on which future actions depend, so it is relevant to a place where decisions are being made that may change the fate of the globe. Climate change for example, or isolated events, like the recent, controversial proposal for a uranium mine in South Greenland. Of course, the word also features in a famous English poem.

It was to the Greenlandic dictionary that I turned as a custodian, leaving the word between its pages. Greenlandic has a long tradition of adopting loan words so I like to think my insertion will be welcome. Of course, that word was only one of a large edition printed by Frances and Nicolas. Perhaps it was the weight of all these unwanted words that led me to create the artist's book proviso as a record of the intervention. My own vanity likes the idea of leaving things behind too much.

Photographs (c) Peter Abrahams / Lucid Plane

The Third Thing

I like riddles. Perhaps Gollum's 'Voiceless it cries, / Wingless flutters, / Toothless bites, / Mouthless mutters' in The Hobbit was the first I encountered. Then the far more ancient, suggestive kenning of Anglo-Saxon riddles from the Exeter Book. The equivocal scraps, stones and body parts that voice the works of the poet Vasco Popa. 

Writing a riddle demands concision, yet the frame of reference must be universal. Why title any poem with anything but a question mark? When I start writing about one thing, I soon notice that I’m describing another. A small object takes on a greater significance. This same shape-shifting perspective may be what draws me to Inuit ivory sculpture, tiny objects that from one angle may be a polar bear, from another, a human being. You head out in one direction, but find yourself somewhere unexpected.

It was a great honour when Frances and Nicolas McDowall of the Old Stile Press contacted me to ask permission to use my translation of one of the riddles from the Exeter Book in a new anthology of writings on water.

The Third Thing is a selection of poems with woodcut images by Ralph Kiggell. Water and swimming have featured strongly in Kiggell’s life and when the Old Stile Press commissioned a second book to follow his hugely successful Leading the Cranes Home (2006) it was only natural that the subject should be ‘water’.

A generous slideshow of pages from the book can be seen on the Old Stile Press website, where the publishers write:

"Roger Deakin, the author of Waterlog, linked the passion to swim to our body’s mystical sympathy for water: ‘When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is - water.’ However, swimming was not to be the focus of the book and Ralph allowed himself to explore poems and prose from across different ages and cultures. Writers have shown us that from sea to land to cloud and back to sea, the cycle of water encapsulates history and life itself. ... There are driving shafts of rain, frozen crystals, rivers which support teeming life on boats, clouds heavy with impending downpours. All derive from D.H. Lawrence’s wonder at the unknowable ‘third thing’ that, with an oxygen atom and two of hydrogen, completes the mystery of water."

Other poets in his selection include Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Padraic Colum and John Masefield. As well as the riddle, I have contributed a new poem, written in collaboration with Anna Zvegintzov, ‘The Last Assignment’.

The book can be purchased from the Old Stile Press. Main Edition: ISBN 978-0-907664-89-5 £340 (plus p&p); 
Special Edition: £1250 (plus p&p).

The Third Thing

The poem above, by Lu Yu (in a translation by Arthur Waley) is paired with a woodblock print by Ralph Kiggell. The page spread is from Leading the Cranes Home, a selection of Chinese poems published by The Old Stile Press.

Kiggell, a British artist based in Bangkok, studied traditional woodblock printing in Japan. While working respectfully within this traditional process, he has a thoroughly contemporary vision - exemplified in a recent series of prints depicting pylons and water towers. Perhaps the 'mountain rain' that pours through the hat of the ox-minding boy in the image above was an omen, for Kiggell's next venture with The Old Stile Press, The Third Thing, will be an anthology of poems about water. (The title is drawn from a poem by D.H. Lawrence.) Kiggell is well qualified for such a subject, having recently completed a remarkable swimming pool mural in Hong Kong. One of the older poems in the volume will be an Anglo-Saxon riddle from The Exeter Book, in my translation. I'm looking forward to seeing how Kiggell responds to the equivocal words through wood and ink.

The Old Stile Press ... the next ten years

In January I visited Frances and Nicolas McDowall in the beautiful Wye Valley in Wales. And I was unable to leave - for the snow fell deeper and deeper around the house. But as the electricity petered out, and supplies of gin depleted, I was not short of reading-matter. I hunched by the fire, carefully cradling enormous hand-printed folios of works by John Donne, Dylan Thomas and many other writers. The purpose of my visit was to catalogue the prodigious output of the MacDowalls’ Old Stile Press during the last ten years.

The press was founded in 1979, and an earlier bibliography, The Old Stile Press in the Twentieth Century (compiled by Dorothy Harrop), covers publications up to the millennium. Since then the press has continued to issue titles prodigiously: the artist Rigby Graham notes that publications have grown ‘larger and more lavish’ with the passing years. The latest instalment, The Old Stile Press … the next ten years, surveys this recent work. It includes the stunning edition of Arthur Waley’s Chinese Poems with wood block prints by the wonderful Ralph Kiggell; the libretto of Benjamin Britten’s Christmas Sequence with woodcuts by Angela Lemaire, and The Abstract Garden, a ground-breaking collaboration between printer Nicolas McDowall, poet Philip Gross, and wood engraver Peter Reddick.

Frances and Nicolas McDowall are adamant that art is inseparable from life. These books arise from conversations with friends and shared enthusiasms. The wide variety of works collected together in this bibliography demonstrate what can be achieved when books are approached with passion and perhaps, on occasion, slight folly - qualities which are rarely glimpsed within the limits of commercially-driven corporations. Once my fingers had recovered from frostbite, I wrote a brief introduction to the work of the press, which is presented here alongside Nicolas' revelations about each book's genesis, and Frances' feature on the state of book collecting.



Above is the wonderful painting of the Old Stile Press demesne by Clive Hicks-Jenkins which graces the cover. The edition is limited to 1000 copies, and the first 250 come with a jeu d’esprit printed at the press, ‘Welcome to Spring’ by Gavin Douglas (c. 1510) illustrated with a border decoration by Eric Gill. The Old Stile Press … the next ten years is priced at £45 and is available (plus £4 p&p in UK) from the Old Stile Press.

Here’s to the next ten years!

Old Stile Press: Figures in a Landscape

My first port of call this year was The Old Stile Press in the beautiful Wye Valley. Frances and Nicolas McDowall, who have been publishing books since 1979, invited me to come and look at their recent titles, and discuss compiling a bibliography to extend a history of the Press first published at the millennium.

Snow fell on the day I arrived, transforming the earthy winter tones of the Forest of Dene (red and orange lichen on the trees, sere growth along the river banks) into a monochrome view worthy of a wood engraving. The Wye wound its dark eddies through pristine snowdrifts in which, as the cold intensified, crystal aggregated to crystal until each flake was visible, large as an eye and intricate as a fern leaf.

Frances McDowall collects plant fibres from the fields and combines them with local spring water, creating the paper for many of the books that Nicolas designs and prints. This splendid partnership offers many artists a rare opportunity to experiment with different print processes and exploit the possibilities of the book form. The impressive list of titles ranges from a miniature haiku collection to, most recently, an ambitious production of Peter Schaffer's Equus, bursting with exuberant multi-media images by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.


A Neo-Romantic sensibility is evident in many of the books. Whether the artist’s work takes shape through colourful figurative linocuts or more sedate engravings of seashells, trees and other natural forms, it seems imbued with what the Inuit call inue or "soul". The mystical elements of the landscape are expressed particularly strongly by the exceptional printmaker Angela Lemaire, whether in the mountain that swallows up a whole generation of children in The Pyed Pyper, or in the Scottish Border landscapes haunted by faeries and ghosts in Secret Commonwealth, a seventeenth-century account of the uncanny by Robert Kirk.

Printing Bookmarks

Many of the bookmarks I’ve seen during my research on the topic for the University of the West of England's Bookmarks VII project date from the beginning of the twentieth century – they were produced using letterpress and type-high blocks. I decided to return to letterpress for my own design, and visited the Old Stile Press, where I printed the bookmarks on the Albion hand press from polymer plates. Nicolas McDowall snapped the following photos during one of my dawn stints on the press.

The Old Stile Press

The Old Stile Press have been lurking in the bloglist on the right for some time. Their blog is rich in anecdotes about books and breath-taking photos of the Wye Valley.


Last week I dropped by to see the press for myself. The printing office is not so much Beatrice Warde's 'crossroads of civilisation' as a rural idyll in the vein of Samuel Palmer, complete with moss-encrusted barns. However the latest work from the press looks far beyond the Wye Valley to the seas around Orkney. The Girl from the Sea, a little known play by George Mackay Brown, relates the disadvantages of taking a beautiful selkie home as your bride. The evocative images of seals and crofters are by Michael Onken. I love the way the play captures the sense in which humans depend on the sea, and how some are prepared to give themselves up to its mystery.