Rosie Johnston enjoys a collection of ekphrastic poetry by Derek Sellen
The Other Guernica â Poems Inspired by Spanish Art
Derek Sellen
Cultured Llama, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9957381-2-6
98pp ÂŁ10
Derek Sellenâs note to his poem âGuernica â on the mural by Picassoâ tells us that when Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State, came to the United Nations in February 2003 to seek approval for a multi-national invasion of Iraq, a blue veil was brought in to cover the buildingâs reproduction of Guernica âto avoid any jarring imagesâ. The painting, Sellen says, lost none of its power:
It burns through any veil, it distorts with horror:
the twisted face of art looks at the twisted heart of war.
Derek Sellen, also a writer of short stories and plays, has won various poetry awards, including Poets Meet Politics, O Bheal Five Words and Poetry Pulse. He was 2018 Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year. While his subjects range from Korean musicians to Indian cave-paintings, this collection concentrates on his love of Spain and Spanish culture.
The Other Guernica, elegantly published by Cultured Llama, is a masterclass in ekphrastic poetry. Its first lesson begins with the title and cover. âFlightâ is one of five mysterious frescoes called âLos Otros Guernicasâ commissioned of Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla to display in the Spanish Pavilion at the 1939 Worldâs Fair in Flushing Meadows. Because of Francoâs rise to ascendancy at home, the frescoes never made it to the Fair and were displayed instead by the Associated American Arts, after which they went missing. In 1990, a New York Times article declared that the frescoes had turned up in 144-146 Bleecker Street, NYC, once the avant garde Bleeker Street Cinema, then a gay porn movie house. âLos Otros Guernicasâ deserve a film of their own, including their restoration and new home at the University of Cantabria in the part of northern Spain where Quintanilla was born.
Giving us the frescoesâ individual titles, Sellen brings their subject matter right to our door:
Hunger, Destruction, Soldiers, Pain, Flight;
abstracted emblems for his time and ours,
the other Sarajevo, the other Fallujah, the other Aleppo.
In his preface, the poet says, âThe majority of the poems are âsuggestedâ by the paintings and have in fact taken off in quite another direction from any that the artist intendedâ. The publisher provides an online list with links to the paintings in Sellenâs collection â if a reader cannot see the inspirational subject matter, ekphrastic poetry can feel rather one-eyed â but Sellenâs poems stand as vibrant pieces of imaginative art in their own right.
Several of the poems place us in the scenario of the painted character, eyeball to eyeball. Of âAesopâ (by Velazquez) for example, the poet says, âThat face â you had to invent itâ:
A jobbing story-teller, a fabled fabulist,
with a biography that begins in the slave quarters
and ends at the bottom of a cliff.
By the threshold of power,
leaning slightly back in wry appraisal,
in the atrium of a global bank or the hallway of a parliament,
he sees the fox and cockerel in you.
Other poems are in the voice of a character in the paintingâs story. âThe Firing Squadâ gives us Goyaâs famous âEl 3 de Mayoâ (painted in 1814 to celebrate Spainâs resistance to Napoleonâs armies during the Peninsular War). One of the fusiliers is speaking – âI am the third soldier from the left, tan boots, a tall hatâ. He is not new to the job:
He and I have faced each other before in this place,
I know the way his white shirt billows into wings
when he spreads his arms in a martyrâs welcome,
twists his mouth and shouts one of the usual things:
I die for Christ, I die for freedom, I die for IslamâŚ
His face has all the passion a human face can bear
but when I turn, youâll see a face no different from yours.
There may be a nod to Browningâs âMy Last Duchessâ in âLa Marquesa, IIâ (responding to Retrato de la Marquesa de Alquibla by Angeles Santos) where a titled wife in 1928 is given her say, again in the first person. She has passed the age where she cares for blandishment:
Paint what I am. Not one of those flatteries
skimping the truth, where thirty-seven appears
like twenty. Show me with those extra years
Of riper flesh, brooding on missed lecheries.
These stories, often in sonnet form, are convincingly imagined and rendered with wit and impressive economy.
âStill Life â by Luis Melendezâ is arguably Sellenâs most perfect ekphrastic work, compressing into his sonnet a trompe lâoeil discussion of how art plays at being real.
No more or less than it seems. A side of salmon.
As large and weighty as a ham, as convoluted as a rose,
it sits on its own shadow, a presence not a pose,
between a bowl, a pot, and the obligatory lemon.
Sellen enjoys playing with our perception of the painting: âAt any moment the cook will enter, the kitchen cat will salivate;/ but when you approach, it turns to paint.â
The collection is in four parts, the first (âRicher for Its Singularitiesâ) being about relationships and individuals; the second (âThey Hardly Know Whyâ) about war and violence; the third (âThe Circling Beeâ) art and artists, and four (âOlive, Almond, Honey, Figâ) about place. What has been missing until Part IV is the poet himself. After all the intellectual and artistic finesse of the previous sections, âDrunk In Salamancaâ takes us to a city ânot short of barsâ:
We are drinking
a heavy red flecked with grapeskin
in the tenth bar of the night
Sellenâs Spanish friends are âre-baptising me after a long absenceâ. He is home again among the ârich facadesâ of the city, discussing Franco, âhis long regime a vanishing folk-memoryâ:
âDonât talk of that,â say others.
Drink more.
Step out into the wide paved field.
I am spinning.
The Plaza revolves in the opposite direction,
I am falling.
I am looking up at the galaxies.
This terrain of honey-golden stone is where I choose to lie.
The evening has become a tender love story, running to the heart of this powerful, evocative collection.
Rosie Johnston‘s four poetry books, published by Lapwing Publications in Belfast, are Sweet Seventeens (2010), Orion (2012), Bittersweet Seventeens (2014) and Six-Count Jive (2019). Her poems have appeared or featured in Hedgerow, London Grip, Culture NI, FourxFour, The Honest Ulsterman, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Mary Evans Picture Libraryâs Poems and Pictures blog, Words for the Wild, From The Edge magazine and in Live Canonâs anthologies â154: In Response to Shakespeareâs Sonnetsâ (2016) & âNew Poems for Christmasâ (2018). She has read her poetry widely, including Hungerford Literary Festival, Watfordâs Big Word festival, Winchesterâs Loose Muse, the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden, the Troubadour, Torriano, Margateâs Pie Factory, In-Words in Greenwich and Whitstableâs Harbour Books. Rosie was poet in residence for the Cambridgeshire Wildlife Trust until she moved to live by the sea in Kent. www.rosiejohnstonwrites.com
London Grip Poetry Review – Derek Sellen
July 11, 2019 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, painting, poetry reviews, year 2019 • Tags: books, poetry, Rosie Johnston • 0 Comments
Rosie Johnston enjoys a collection of ekphrastic poetry by Derek Sellen
Derek Sellenâs note to his poem âGuernica â on the mural by Picassoâ tells us that when Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State, came to the United Nations in February 2003 to seek approval for a multi-national invasion of Iraq, a blue veil was brought in to cover the buildingâs reproduction of Guernica âto avoid any jarring imagesâ. The painting, Sellen says, lost none of its power:
Derek Sellen, also a writer of short stories and plays, has won various poetry awards, including Poets Meet Politics, O Bheal Five Words and Poetry Pulse. He was 2018 Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year. While his subjects range from Korean musicians to Indian cave-paintings, this collection concentrates on his love of Spain and Spanish culture.
The Other Guernica, elegantly published by Cultured Llama, is a masterclass in ekphrastic poetry. Its first lesson begins with the title and cover. âFlightâ is one of five mysterious frescoes called âLos Otros Guernicasâ commissioned of Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla to display in the Spanish Pavilion at the 1939 Worldâs Fair in Flushing Meadows. Because of Francoâs rise to ascendancy at home, the frescoes never made it to the Fair and were displayed instead by the Associated American Arts, after which they went missing. In 1990, a New York Times article declared that the frescoes had turned up in 144-146 Bleecker Street, NYC, once the avant garde Bleeker Street Cinema, then a gay porn movie house. âLos Otros Guernicasâ deserve a film of their own, including their restoration and new home at the University of Cantabria in the part of northern Spain where Quintanilla was born.
Giving us the frescoesâ individual titles, Sellen brings their subject matter right to our door:
In his preface, the poet says, âThe majority of the poems are âsuggestedâ by the paintings and have in fact taken off in quite another direction from any that the artist intendedâ. The publisher provides an online list with links to the paintings in Sellenâs collection â if a reader cannot see the inspirational subject matter, ekphrastic poetry can feel rather one-eyed â but Sellenâs poems stand as vibrant pieces of imaginative art in their own right.
Several of the poems place us in the scenario of the painted character, eyeball to eyeball. Of âAesopâ (by Velazquez) for example, the poet says, âThat face â you had to invent itâ:
Other poems are in the voice of a character in the paintingâs story. âThe Firing Squadâ gives us Goyaâs famous âEl 3 de Mayoâ (painted in 1814 to celebrate Spainâs resistance to Napoleonâs armies during the Peninsular War). One of the fusiliers is speaking – âI am the third soldier from the left, tan boots, a tall hatâ. He is not new to the job:
There may be a nod to Browningâs âMy Last Duchessâ in âLa Marquesa, IIâ (responding to Retrato de la Marquesa de Alquibla by Angeles Santos) where a titled wife in 1928 is given her say, again in the first person. She has passed the age where she cares for blandishment:
These stories, often in sonnet form, are convincingly imagined and rendered with wit and impressive economy.
âStill Life â by Luis Melendezâ is arguably Sellenâs most perfect ekphrastic work, compressing into his sonnet a trompe lâoeil discussion of how art plays at being real.
Sellen enjoys playing with our perception of the painting: âAt any moment the cook will enter, the kitchen cat will salivate;/ but when you approach, it turns to paint.â
The collection is in four parts, the first (âRicher for Its Singularitiesâ) being about relationships and individuals; the second (âThey Hardly Know Whyâ) about war and violence; the third (âThe Circling Beeâ) art and artists, and four (âOlive, Almond, Honey, Figâ) about place. What has been missing until Part IV is the poet himself. After all the intellectual and artistic finesse of the previous sections, âDrunk In Salamancaâ takes us to a city ânot short of barsâ:
Sellenâs Spanish friends are âre-baptising me after a long absenceâ. He is home again among the ârich facadesâ of the city, discussing Franco, âhis long regime a vanishing folk-memoryâ:
The evening has become a tender love story, running to the heart of this powerful, evocative collection.
Rosie Johnston‘s four poetry books, published by Lapwing Publications in Belfast, are Sweet Seventeens (2010), Orion (2012), Bittersweet Seventeens (2014) and Six-Count Jive (2019). Her poems have appeared or featured in Hedgerow, London Grip, Culture NI, FourxFour, The Honest Ulsterman, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Mary Evans Picture Libraryâs Poems and Pictures blog, Words for the Wild, From The Edge magazine and in Live Canonâs anthologies â154: In Response to Shakespeareâs Sonnetsâ (2016) & âNew Poems for Christmasâ (2018). She has read her poetry widely, including Hungerford Literary Festival, Watfordâs Big Word festival, Winchesterâs Loose Muse, the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden, the Troubadour, Torriano, Margateâs Pie Factory, In-Words in Greenwich and Whitstableâs Harbour Books. Rosie was poet in residence for the Cambridgeshire Wildlife Trust until she moved to live by the sea in Kent. www.rosiejohnstonwrites.com