Trackside

Artist’s book on 28 square sheets of handmade cotton-rag paper (each 21cm x 21cm) in concertina form, making 14 double-pages plus front and back covers; total length 294 cm long by 21cm high, and book closed in slipcase 11cm w x 22cm h x 5cm d; watercolour and acrylics; text lettered with a driftwood stick; setting a complete poem Trackside by Maureen Duffy, from Wanderer (The Pottery Press 2020). Signed, numbered and dated, this copy is number 1 of 3 variants.

Maureen Duffy read her poem Trackside at the launch of her latest collection, and told how it was inspired by a train journey out of Liverpool Street Station, eastwards along the river to Southend, to visit her cousin. As she read the poem, we in the audience could see the grime of station and sidings and East End gradually give way to the ‘backdrop of woods and fields … green and growing.’

I found this poem irresistibly inspiring for an artist’s book, with steadily diminishing railway tracks providing a continual design framework to draw the narrative through the pages — one long line, all the way to Southend — and the view, foreground and distant, following the text. I photographed the rails and sleepers at Kentish Town West overground station to get the stones and the fixings right for the first, close-up pages. Since making this book, I now narrowly examine railway embankments and the trackside wildlife on every overground train journey, and am constantly astonished by forests of flowering buddleia in west London wastelands (Willesden Junction in August).

I think of books like this as contemporary illuminated manuscripts, Books of Hours, and perhaps they can serve the same function as the medieval ones did, and still do, as objects of contemplation that connect us with spiritual and emotional truths beyond the everyday, opening up the poem to a slower reading and connecting our senses with the words. The experience of handling the book as you read, turning its pages, feeling the handmade paper, breathing the scent of the materials, connects its physical nature with the words, and the visual engagement of reading words that form part of an image an image, especially a continuous one, allows the sound and meaning(s) of the words to flow through the reading. The text becomes illuminated, rather than illustrated, seen in a different light.

I’ve been working on my Singing the Year series for about fifteen years now, adding different poems, different settings as I come across them — and all the poems I have set in this on-going series are Books of Hours, or illuminated manuscripts, with some focus on the cycle of the seasons, the passage of time, or more loosely, as here in Trackside, an examination of the human place in the landscape of time. It’s a joy to find a new poem like Trackside to set, but I’m also excited to discover poems from other times, other places, like the poem in the following book, In beauty.