Under the Quarry Woods

Under the Quarry Woods by Jeremy Hooker is the third in our series of pamphlets from The Pottery Press. Quarried from journals written over 16 years at his home in a Welsh former mining village, these new prose poems by the eminent poet and critic are alive with observations, impressions, memory and dream.  Forming a meditation on a place and its people, they reveal an industrially- scarred landscape in which the writer finds himself to be at once a stranger and at home – and his response is powerful, moving, lyrical and humane.

As a lettering artist I’ve been lucky to work with Jeremy Hooker’s words for many years now, setting his lines and poems in an on-going collection of artist’s books, many of them in my Singing the Year series of contemporary Books of Hours, and in an artist’s film The moment that holds you.  I found this new sequence as inspiring as ever – subtle, deeply felt, closely observed, visually arresting word-pictures that reveal more than they say.  The harshness of the scarred landscape is illuminated by glimpses of natural beauty and by possibilities of regeneration for the land and its fractured communities – and shadowed by some impossibilities too.

These juxtapositions and contrasts in texture, colour and tone were very stimulating for me as an artist – and for the design of the book cover I looked for an image that combined darkness and light, destruction and tentative regeneration, drawn from the deep woodland landscape.  I chose a photo I took a few years ago of a lightning-struck oak tree in the middle of the woods, surrounded by small oak saplings sprung from its acorns, all under a lowering sky of heavy cloud; dark layers of woodland and cloud-cover, with the small new growth determinedly emerging. Lightning oak with saplings.

For the colour images within the book, I chose a poem from the heart of the sequence:

As I wait in the car four seagulls fly over the supermarket carpark, crying.  For an instant I smell the sea and hear the swash of waves on shingle, curling over and withdrawing.

Distance returns, restless as the tides.

My memory is salt with longing.

I made an artist’s book setting this poem with a sheet of handmade paper the colour of sand and shingle, folded and torn into a sequence of pages, but readily restored to the whole image – and then I painted the image with watercolour and gouache mixed with salt-water, lettering the words with a small driftwood stick and a wooden clothes-peg. The book is called Salt wave, and it’s contained in a portfolio slip-case, shown here first:

Under the Quarry Woods is available from The Pottery Press at Potters’ Yard Arts for £5.

ISBN: 978-0-9930171-3-1

Contact studio[at]pottersyard.co.uk