Stuart Henson reflects on the serendipity that led to the creation of a high-quality artistâs book from Redfox Press which combines photographic images with poems by John Greening
Achill Island Tagebuch
John Greening
Redfox Press, 2019.
(No ISBN)
44pp ÂŁ30.00
Sometimes things fall perfectly into place. Not always, but sometimes. And this happened for my good friend John Greening last summer when he took on a fortnightâs residency at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island in the west of County Mayo. For John, a professed Germanophile and Yeats enthusiast, the residency was something of a gift. Whatâs not to like, indeed, about sea, solitude, sunlight and Slievemore in the distance? The only hazard might be that having arrived in such a time-hallowed spot a certain obligation, for a writer at least, hangs in the air.
Never one to shirk a challenge, he set about recording the events from day to day of his stay in the sequence of sonnets that make up this delightful little bookâand to set the seal upon it, whom should he find not much more than a mile away from the cottage but the perfect publisher for such a work. Redfox is the imprint of two artists, Francis van Maele and Antic-ham (known collectively as Franticham) who make fine press editions of painters, photographers and writers from Europe and the US, selling them at book-fairs throughout the world, so as you would expect, the production values of this volume are extremely high. Measuring 15 x 20 cm the Achill Island Tagebuch, so named in honour of Böllâs own Irish Journal, is hand sewn, bound in matt boards with a cloth spine and laser-printed in a numbered edition of 150. The cover features an emulsion-transfer image from a polaroid of an Achill cottage with the mountain in the background, and the text is artfully interspersed with five more of Frantichamâs atmospheric photographs which set the context and interact resonantly with the poems.
The sonnet has been a serviceable form ever since it was imported from the continent. Its fourteen lines give you time to draw out an idea and wrestle it to a conclusion. The rhymes allow for a degree of detachment and a leavening of wit. In these respects itâs well-suited to John Greeningâs project which is not unlike those âencounter groupsâ popular in the seventies in which the participants analyse the behaviour of the group as they go alongâthough this is determinedly a group of one.
Thatâs not to say that other characters donât appear. The ghost of Böll taps him on the back in the first poem and Greening returns the compliment by rhyming him twice â with âschoolâ and âscrollâ â before clinching the Shakespearian scheme with âsonnetâ and âchanced upon itâ. In others we meet a German family who happen to be touring; another artist, Conor Gallagher; a hill walker searching for a path, and somewhat enigmatically, âTwo girls who are âresearching jellyfishââ, characterised in the title as âMedusae,â who have left a note at his gate.
âŠThey say they wish
to discover more (âletâs have a drinkâ) about â
well, who knows what precisely they are after.
Oneâs French, oneâs Dutch. Iâm going to ignore them,
though theyâre âvery curiousâ and (cue your laughter)
are hoping to âshare thoughts.â
The poet, admirably, retains focus on his self-imposed task (âMy thoughts would bore themâ) but you canât help wondering what mythological and ecological delights he, or they, may have missed out on.
Greening, indeed, seems more at home with the books of those who have come before him to the cottage, like the Irish writer Moya Cannon, or with the spirits of Yeats, John F. Deane, Seamus Heaney and Dennis OâDriscoll who fly in and out of the sonnets like wild swans. The presiding genius, naturally, is Böll in whose âprivater Ortâ
âŠartists may âan ihren Werken arbeitenâ,
or hang above a cold, sheer gulf of thought
releasing vowels folded to a pattern
with images: a peace agreement signed
on both sides of the gateâŠ
Our hermit, however, is not without a sense of humour. If he must be torn at all it is for his penchant for ingenious word-play. In âAccompanimentâ, for example we find him walking with the sea on his left hand, âshimmering there, playing soul-/ful accompaniment to your right hand / the piece (as long as itâs in C)âŠâ Good poets, according to Auden have a weakness for bad puns, but in the sonnet âMarsâ in which Greening tells us that ânews comes dropping slow / on Achillâ he takes the art to a whole new level concluding
âŠThis is the power
of looking out from headlines to the sea,
and listening for the news thatâs in us, free.
My own preference is for the poems where landscape fuses with mythology and circumstance, as in âThe Pale Helmetâ which begins
Thinking about OâDriscoll, I looked down
to where my helmet lay, after my long
heroic quest into the drifts, the dunes,
the tall and tufted reeds. It was the wrong
colour. There seems to be an error. Not mine.
Yet mine is clearly nowhere in the house.
This changeling has been left. During my spin,
I must have been diverted by some host
of the air of Achill.
The half-rhymes run smooth, and the creative ambiguity of the âNot mineâ (both error and helmet) works happily. Thereâs a self-deprecating irony in the play of the helmet and hero imagery thatâs attractive too. The polaroid of a bicycle against a cottage wall, sharing the spread with the poem, is a pleasing example also of the understated effectiveness of Frantichamâs contributions.
Not everyone, I realise, will be able to afford the ÂŁ30 or 35 Euros that place the Achill Island Tagebuch firmly in the artistâs-book collectorâs market, but for those who can, itâs a travelogue thatâs well worth the sharing. If you canât, and still fancy a look at the Sonnetmeister at work, thereâs always Greeningâs New Walk pamphlet Europaâs Flight scheduled for later in the year.
London Grip Poetry Review – John Greening
March 15, 2019 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • art, books, photography, poetry reviews, year 2019 • Tags: art, books, photography, poetry, Stuart Henson • 0 Comments
Stuart Henson reflects on the serendipity that led to the creation of a high-quality artistâs book from Redfox Press which combines photographic images with poems by John Greening
Sometimes things fall perfectly into place. Not always, but sometimes. And this happened for my good friend John Greening last summer when he took on a fortnightâs residency at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island in the west of County Mayo. For John, a professed Germanophile and Yeats enthusiast, the residency was something of a gift. Whatâs not to like, indeed, about sea, solitude, sunlight and Slievemore in the distance? The only hazard might be that having arrived in such a time-hallowed spot a certain obligation, for a writer at least, hangs in the air.
Never one to shirk a challenge, he set about recording the events from day to day of his stay in the sequence of sonnets that make up this delightful little bookâand to set the seal upon it, whom should he find not much more than a mile away from the cottage but the perfect publisher for such a work. Redfox is the imprint of two artists, Francis van Maele and Antic-ham (known collectively as Franticham) who make fine press editions of painters, photographers and writers from Europe and the US, selling them at book-fairs throughout the world, so as you would expect, the production values of this volume are extremely high. Measuring 15 x 20 cm the Achill Island Tagebuch, so named in honour of Böllâs own Irish Journal, is hand sewn, bound in matt boards with a cloth spine and laser-printed in a numbered edition of 150. The cover features an emulsion-transfer image from a polaroid of an Achill cottage with the mountain in the background, and the text is artfully interspersed with five more of Frantichamâs atmospheric photographs which set the context and interact resonantly with the poems.
The sonnet has been a serviceable form ever since it was imported from the continent. Its fourteen lines give you time to draw out an idea and wrestle it to a conclusion. The rhymes allow for a degree of detachment and a leavening of wit. In these respects itâs well-suited to John Greeningâs project which is not unlike those âencounter groupsâ popular in the seventies in which the participants analyse the behaviour of the group as they go alongâthough this is determinedly a group of one.
Thatâs not to say that other characters donât appear. The ghost of Böll taps him on the back in the first poem and Greening returns the compliment by rhyming him twice â with âschoolâ and âscrollâ â before clinching the Shakespearian scheme with âsonnetâ and âchanced upon itâ. In others we meet a German family who happen to be touring; another artist, Conor Gallagher; a hill walker searching for a path, and somewhat enigmatically, âTwo girls who are âresearching jellyfishââ, characterised in the title as âMedusae,â who have left a note at his gate.
The poet, admirably, retains focus on his self-imposed task (âMy thoughts would bore themâ) but you canât help wondering what mythological and ecological delights he, or they, may have missed out on.
Greening, indeed, seems more at home with the books of those who have come before him to the cottage, like the Irish writer Moya Cannon, or with the spirits of Yeats, John F. Deane, Seamus Heaney and Dennis OâDriscoll who fly in and out of the sonnets like wild swans. The presiding genius, naturally, is Böll in whose âprivater Ortâ
Our hermit, however, is not without a sense of humour. If he must be torn at all it is for his penchant for ingenious word-play. In âAccompanimentâ, for example we find him walking with the sea on his left hand, âshimmering there, playing soul-/ful accompaniment to your right hand / the piece (as long as itâs in C)âŠâ Good poets, according to Auden have a weakness for bad puns, but in the sonnet âMarsâ in which Greening tells us that ânews comes dropping slow / on Achillâ he takes the art to a whole new level concluding
My own preference is for the poems where landscape fuses with mythology and circumstance, as in âThe Pale Helmetâ which begins
The half-rhymes run smooth, and the creative ambiguity of the âNot mineâ (both error and helmet) works happily. Thereâs a self-deprecating irony in the play of the helmet and hero imagery thatâs attractive too. The polaroid of a bicycle against a cottage wall, sharing the spread with the poem, is a pleasing example also of the understated effectiveness of Frantichamâs contributions.
Not everyone, I realise, will be able to afford the ÂŁ30 or 35 Euros that place the Achill Island Tagebuch firmly in the artistâs-book collectorâs market, but for those who can, itâs a travelogue thatâs well worth the sharing. If you canât, and still fancy a look at the Sonnetmeister at work, thereâs always Greeningâs New Walk pamphlet Europaâs Flight scheduled for later in the year.