By Jane Routh
ISBN 978-1-8383378-1-0
Price £5
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These thoughtful and elegantly written poems celebrate the way art responds to art, how personal engagement with the fruits of another’s creativity can delve and open up beyond the image itself to explore history, landscape, imagination, the role of women artists and the nature of inspiration itself.
“Each poem addresses a different, named, visual image, drawing the reader into her thoughtful, intimate musings…After is an accomplished pamphlet, proving that lit fuse does spark something special down the line.” Maggie Mackay, Sphinx
“The acid test for ekphrastic work is whether the poem stands on its own without reference to the source artwork. In this case, I think the author is entirely successful. The poems link back to the artwork, but knowledge of the work is not essential. The poems stand on their own. Seeing the artwork adds to and enhances the experience.
Routh’s mind floating free over the meaning of artworks, the way we interpret them and apply them to our own understanding. Routh is a story teller at heart.” Rennie Halstead, londongrip
After
It could not have been otherwise
but the way the novel ended
so filled the fiddler with sadness
he opened the slow reel he was composing
with a such long note of melancholy
it stopped the hand of the potter
listening to it on the radio
so she spilled extra cobalt oxide
into the glaze she was mixing
for a vessel whose shading haunted
the painter when he saw it exhibited
many years later while working
on an abstract which a sculptor
reading an exhibition catalogue late at night
reckoned caught something of the sea
in its shifts and distances
obsessing her with a waking-dream
about a raft riding repeating waves
and had her messing with plaster and card
she turned into a maquette of a boat
she propped to dry on a few wooden skewers
as if it were walking on air
and whose frailty so excited a poet
who dropped by for the Open Studios day
he wrote a long poem titled ‘After’
– though that isn’t the end of it
since who knows what the lit fuse
running between makers unknown
to each other might spark down the line
(previously published in The Dark Horse)