Review by Tracey Foster of "Muse" by Ruth Millington

What came first, the artist or the muse?

Exploring this question is the very heart of this book, looking at artists who had complex relationships with their chosen muse. They were often supported, inspired and encouraged in their art by figures whose roles have fallen into obscurity, leaving us with only an image to construct a legend about: "The perception of the muse is that of a passive, powerless model at the mercy of an influential and older artist. But is this trope a romanticised myth?"

Rather than breaking the history of the myth into chronological sections, Millington explores the role of the muse in different guises. We delve into the muse as a message, performing muses, family albums and self-portraits which give delightful juxtapositions, framing Picasso’s Dora Maar alongside Awol Erizku's photograph of a pregnant Beyonce. Millington's background in TV and radio has helped to develop her direct conversational tone that keeps the content accessible to all and avoids the navel-gazing tendency of some art tomes. 

As easily evidenced on any gallery wall, females make up the bulk of the line-up, but Millington includes a few other examples such as George Dyer, the controversial muse and lover of Francis Bacon who, the story goes, fell through his skylight to the retort from Bacon: "You're not much of a burglar are you? Take off your clothes. Come to bed and you can take what you want."

Dyer's story is one often repeated throughout history; the legend is told by the victor to the spoil. Successful artists concoct a favourable narrative to add to their allure, but if we delve below the surface, we find the truth is often far more nuanced Bacon was able to create his own version about the forty-plus paintings he made of Dyer because his muse, unable to cope with Bacon's infidelity, committed suicide on the eve of a major retrospective. Bacon took many photographs of his muse and continued to use these to create some of his most famous works after he died, only admitting much later in his career that Dyer's tortured demise was his inspiration and the story behind the images. Working through his emotions on canvas he said, "I feel profoundly guilty about his death. If I hadn't gone out, if I'd simply stayed in and made sure he was alright, he might have been alive now."

Vermeer’s "Girl with a Pearl Earring" has long been the subject of speculation and led to the writer Tracy Chevalier's novel that attempted to fictionalise the gap. Recent research, however, has exposed Vermeer’s real intention. Religious allegories reimagined by the family who commissioned the paintings have been attributed to most of the works he painted in one household. The girl sitter could then be simply a young member of the family who fills in for a sequence of biblical representations.

Challenging our expectations of the role of artist and muse is Gentileschi - a talented painter who raised up to the highest levels of painting circles but who had been born a female in a time when her abilities were discouraged and frowned upon. Raped by her tutor at the age of 17 and banned from entering the art establishment, she used her own image to stare out at us and confront our ideals of the female narrative. Reimagining the classics, she retells the tales from the woman's stance in contrast to the male gaze. Her muse is never passive; her beauty is active. "I will show Your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do," she wrote to a patron, defiant and proud of her work. Taking her former tutor to court at a time when women were disbelieved, she swore through torture in the court: "It is true, It is true." She won her case and her tutor was subsequently banished from Rome, but a cloud followed her for rape was considered the shame of the family and she was quickly married off. The work that followed depicted women wronged, such as Salome, and allowed her to exact revenge on the canvas and leave a legacy for us to interpret: "As long as I live, I will have control over my being."

Dora Maar, Picasso’s lover and sitter for over 60 paintings, was an artist in her own right when they met. A successful photographer with her own studio, she deliberately set out to attract this older man by using a knife to stab between her fingers, whilst sat at table in a cafe frequented by Picasso. This daring game worked and he moved her in with his current lover and their child. The ensuing battle that erupted was immaterial to Picasso. He walked out telling them to sort it out between themselves. Picasso's most famous portrait of Maar, entitled "The Weeping Woman," was in response to Dora's gradual deterioration into depression: "Dora for me, was always a weeping woman," he famously exclaimed. 

But Dora had a much heavier influence on his work. Deeply political and active in the left-wing struggle against fascism, she opened his eyes to the cause. Just a few weeks before he had painted "Guernica," his anti-war masterpiece. Posing for a figure of a mother holding her grieving child, photographing the whole production and helping him to mix paints, she was a huge part of its creation. Picasso was still inspired by the experience to go on to make "Weeping Woman" as a further response to the event. To dismiss it later and to attribute it to the emotional whims of a woman is to vastly diminish the part she played and add to his allure as a lover and leaver of women: "For years I gave her a tortured appearance, not out of Sadism, and without any pleasure on my part, but in obedience to a vision that had imposed itself on me." Maar was later to reply: "All Picasso portraits of me are lies. Not one is Dora Maar."

Millington happily gives the muse the last word. These sitters often play a large part in any artistic creation but often never get any credit. Their part is frozen to a moment and their voices muted. To get a fuller picture, we need to listen to their story. Here at last is that perspective: "This book will demonstrate the true power that muses have held. Without doubt, it's time that we reconsidered muses, reclaiming them from reductive stereotypes, to illuminate their real, involved and diverse roles throughout art history." 

About the reviewer
After a long career as an Art and Design teacher, Tracey Foster wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, The Haiku Foundation, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Cold Moon Journal, Madswirl, Five Fleas, The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy" by Martin Gayford

At least they can't cancel Spring was a refrain coined by David Hockney in 2020 when he found himself locked down in Normandy, surrounded by his newly acquired orchard.

Gayford, who is the art critic for the Spectator, had a long relationship with Hockney that went back over 45 years. Having previously written two books together, History of Pictures and Secret Knowledge, the pair were in constant communication before the outbreak of Covid-19. Sharing images, thoughts, connections via emails and post, the impact of lockdown was to become a focus during the subsequent isolation of the artist in his new studio, a converted barn. To use Hockney’s favourite word, they had a good natter. The premise of this book is to explore that period and the outpouring of landscapes that came from confinement, whilst making connections between other artworks and theories and the fragility of the human race. While we were condemned to sofa surfing, team meetings, home schooling and baking bread, Hockney and Gayford looked closely at our relationship with nature and the art of sitting still and noticing every detail about us.

We have lost touch with nature, rather foolishly as we are part of it, not outside it. This in time will be over and then what?

This chimes with the mood of the period, when we quit our confines for daily walks and began to turn to nature for relief. Finding solace in the sunsets, wellness in our woodlands, we, like Hockney, looked at the details around us. Back when the mortality of our existence was a daily bulletin, Hockney was aware of his presence and role as an observer and recorder of life. 

I've witnessed quite a few changes in the art world and you know, most artists are going to be forgotten. That's their fate. It might be mine too. 

The landscapes he drew with pencil, paintbrush and iPad were simple marks and dots of colour but conveyed the freshness of nature unfurling in a time of great immobility. The inevitably of Spring, nature's great drive to procreate and live, was a reminder of our raison d'etre when we needed it most. 

This book is a great commentary on the lockdown of 2020, seen through the eyes of two people. Their conversations and discussions traverse art, opera, food, postcards and fairy tales. This is a roundabout ride of ideas and ideology, focusing on themes close to the artist’s heart: colour, shade, time, perspective, water and nature with reference to those who influenced him most, Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, Hokusai and Rembrandt. The book is punctuated throughout with glorious images that pay homage to the skill of the mark maker and a visual history of time, weather and viewpoints.

I last saw a Hockney retrospective in 2012 at the Royal Academy of Arts, A Bigger Picture. Although I was aware of his large portraits, California pools and Wolds landscapes, it was his pencil sketches that fascinated me most. His draftsman skills are imbued with sensitivity as he layers up marks to create texture and depth. This was at the forefront when I read this book. The Normandy iPad sketches he created with a bespoke painting app use similar marks and movement to convey the cherry blossoms, riverbeds and pathways surrounding the farm.

Hockney finally left his Normandy studio at the end of 2024 and moved back to London. Failing health in his late eighties has drawn him closer to amenities and available health care. A prolific artist who has worked every day since turning sixteen, and who painted the mantra Get up and start work straight away on his bedroom chest of drawers, is not due to stop work soon. We can only wait to see what becomes his next muse. 

Everybody's looking at the same picture, but they don't see the same thing. We see with memory. 

About the reviewer
After a long career as an Art and Design teacher, Tracey Foster wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, The Haiku Foundation, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Cold Moon Journal, Madswirl, Five Fleas, the Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way" by Anthony Seldon

Establishing a path for future generations to tread in the footsteps of silent witnesses was the goal of Douglas Gillespie, a young officer serving at the front in 1915. Seldon, an author of historical books, had spent a long time researching the First World War and was particularly intrigued by a letter Gillespie wrote to his headmaster, expressing a desire that in the future, everyone should walk in the footsteps of soldiers of both sides of the war: a path of peace, a path of remembrance, a walk to honour those who fought for our future. Gillespie’s vision for Via Sacra gained some support in 1916 when his posthumous letters were published by his parents in the book Letters from Flanders. This was quickly dismissed after the turmoil unleashed on the countryside in the battles of the Somme and Passchendaele rendered it almost impossible.

Back in 2021, Seldon found himself at Kilometer Zero, during a pandemic, attempting to walk the whole Path of Peace. Recording the journey on his phone, he attempted to do two things, undertaking two walks in parallel: "One, through Covid-affected villages in the present moment, with flies and sweat, while trying to puzzle out the route; and two, walking a hundred years ago along the old front line, missing the flies and sweat, the fear and noise."

This is a walk that is unmarked, built on and bordered, a path that is hard to define, often blocked and private. Undeterred, Seldon battles along stretches of B roads, lined with ossified tree stumps and relics of war. He recalls entries from First World War diaries: "Here nature is disfigured by war. There is not a tree trunk which does not bear the trace of shot or shell; the bark of the pines bears gashes, other trees are amputated halfway up or cut close to the ground."

Seldon reflects, whilst walking, what the original aim of a path of peace was. Gillespie wanted hikers from both sides to walk this route to comprehend where war can lead. Seldon decides to ruminate on those he has offended throughout his literary career and concludes "it’s painful. But walks, like prayerful silence, can change us within."

Utilizing war poetry and archive diaries, the walk is undertaken with reference to strategic advances and losses and the personal correspondence of those that endured it. Kipling was one of those whose story parallels the sad fate of many British families awaiting good news back home. After pushing his seventeen-year-old son into war, he was later devastated by his senseless death in battle. John Kipling, inexperienced and naive, was an officer in the Battle of Loos, recklessly leading his men into a charge with a head wound. His death led Kipling to write: "I have many times asked myself whether there can be any more potent advocates of peace upon earth than this massed multitude of witnesses to the desolation of war."

The war cemeteries that line this walk bear witness to the numbers of silent witnesses who leave behind only a name, and for many more not even that.

Seldon finishes his work at the coast of Ostend still under Covid restrictions and worries that he may not be allowed back into Blighty. He returns in 2022 to cut the ribbon on his newly marked path where the word has spread about Gillespie’s Via Sacra, France and Belgium committing to maintain the route and add way markers: "A walk to enhance and deepen life, not to dwell on loss. A 1,000 Kilometer path along the whole Western Front, with people of all nationalities walking side by side, learning from the silent witnesses where war leads, feels like a drop in the ocean. But it is a drop which is becoming a stream, a stream which will become a mighty river, a roaring sea."

About the reviewer

Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Haiku Foundation, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site, The Small Sublime, found here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects" by Glenn Adamson

Reading this book reminded me of the adage: "Poets, we get it. Some things remind us of other things." 

All very amusing, but it doesn't explain why we have such an obsession with the objects we keep about us. While I write this, most of the human race is presently hunched over, worshiping at the altar of the flat screen, including myself.

Adamson investigates our need to accumulate and collect things and vocalize our appreciation of the world around us. He highlights the classification method used by Susan Stewart in her book, On Longing, in four categories: "The gigantic, the miniature, the collection and the souvenir." We name and claim large objects to bring them into our reach: mountains, oceans, planets and galaxies. We dissect and scrutinize our world down to the smallest cell or microbe. Then there is our need to catalogue and collect every variant until there are no gaps, and our desire to hold items once connected to our loved ones or historical figures. All these aspects make us human.

Our language is haptic-infused. Manual, manufacture, manoeuvre, we feel our way through life and have an impulse to touch objects to inherently understand them. The sixteenth-century art historian Giorgio Vasari said, "It is necessary to have the compass in the eyes and not the hand, because the hand works and the eye judges." Touch was previously thought the lesser of the senses, linked intrinsically to manual work and the lower classes. Helen Keller redefined how intrinsic our hands are to being fully cognizant of the world around us. Her book was the first to delve deeply into the importance of our fifth sense to fully see. 

Adamson spent time at the V&A museum and was director of the Arts & Design Museum in New York whilst writing this book. He is an advocate of moderation, reducing our world of stuff to just the essential or aesthetic. He explores William Morris' mantra: "Have nothing in your house that you know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." 

This book fully explores our relationship with objects, whilst maintaining a plea for living a life less cluttered. This seems a valid call following on from the excess of Christmas, the frenzy of exchanging goods and the aftermath of stuffing our homes with even more items we don’t really need. Museums are often guilty of acquiring masses of objects that spend their whole life in storage. Adamson spends one chapter exploring our multifaceted response to antiquities in museums, including paintings: "Any painting is an embodied moment of truth."

We bring our experiences and expectations when we visit museums. This can skew our reactions and temper our responses. Galleries lay out a default blank slate; cabinets are clear and clutter-free to allow us personal interaction with each object. Visitors experience a unique reaction, dependent upon race, gender, age and class, transforming everyday items into "cultural icons."

This book pleads for restraint when amassing items around us, a quick calculation of the carbon footprint we contribute to and collate in our world of stuff. Adamson is a believer of mend and reuse or, like the Japanese art of Kintsugi, the need to learn to live with the broken, as a memento of our time here on earth. The book is a call for a resurgence of material intelligence: as our stuff gets more technical, we become more removed from its creation: "Skin should be understood a site of intelligence." We should be more discerning with it. 

About the reviewer

Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Haiku Foundation, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site, The Small Sublime, found here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "The Gallows Pole" by Benjamin Myers

Much has been written about the pros and cons of using slang in fiction. It's a difficult act to pull off, if your audience cannot understand or interpret the meaning behind the text. I had also heard about the strange phenomenon of how the brain can interpret written phrases even when the key vowels are removed, an exercise that is fun to do, but not something I would attempt to do in fiction. These doubts were in my mind as I started Myers's book The Gallows Pole. His protagonist and narrator speaks directly to us in Yorkshire dialect, written as heard and without punctuation. The first few words were hard to transcribe, but then it was like a lightbulb had gone on and I could suddenly, fluently read the strange words: "In the fyres of the forges in the Black Cuntry was where I first herd tell of coinin where I learnit a little bout chippin and clippin swimmers where I learnit bout the yeller trade and the work of them men that darest do."

Myers delves into the true history of the Cragg Vale Coiners, led by David Hartley, a notorious rebel who enlisted a gang of weavers and land workers to clip coins and defraud the Crown. An offence punishable by death, they worked in secret and avoided detection because of their remote settings in the Yorkshire hills. Using historical facts and court transcripts he weaves a narrative about a group that unleashes a reign of menace onto the local communities, who are caught up in their practices. The events that lead up to the capture and resultant hanging of the gang leaders is fast paced and gripping and involves a cat-and-mouse chase with an excise man and the law.

Dark and gritty, Myers's novel uses a wealth of guttural language to convey the destitution and desperation that led to the necessity for an illegal trade. Clipping real coins and shaving off small particles, they would melt down and repress the metal to create forgeries, passing them off in trade within the local communities: "The night came in like a bruise of purple and blues and then finally griped so tight that the sky was black and broken by the weight of time pressing upon it. Dawn would melt the night in fading yellows but for now the sun seemed like an impossibility; a dead concept. A foreign country."

Myers's skill for evoking place with pathos and descriptions of the dark vales led him to be awarded the Roger Deakin Prize in 2017 for writing about "natural history, landscape and environment." It also secured the Walter Scott prize in 2018, leading to a TV adaptation by the director Shane Meadows. Critics described the book as "a roaring furnace of a novel." The author's childhood in suburb of Durham was uneventful but allowed him the freedom to explore and, as he described, he "spent a lot of time climbing up trees or trespassing on roofs." This familiarity with nature seeps through the novel as his excise man roams the valleys in the dark, catching whispers from taverns and firelight from hidden forges. He keeps his narrative in tune with the earth, that eventually gives up its secrets: "Autumn arrived like a burning ghost ship on the landscape’s tide to set the land alight. The fires of the trees’ turning spread far across the flanks and the ravens took flight to the highest climes as leaves fell like flung bodies. September had long slipped away. It was a charred thing now. Gone."

Myers is no stranger to beautiful prose: his poetry collection Heathcliff Adrift from 2014 also used the moors to ground human emotions, allowing them to resonate with our earthy instincts:

To the sky

we ran
and fell
the heather our mattress
the worms our witness –

young lungs burning.
Wet-backed,
soil soaked
mulch-coddled, copper puddled.
Dirt giggled and dizzy.

Fists of earth
raised, thrown –
fecund confetti
for a future union.
The rustling of life.

Several passages of The Gallows Pole could also be read like poetry, finding a turn of phrase to turn the ear. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys historical fiction but also relishes beautiful prose and is loath to sacrifice one to suit the other. Myers’s visceral novel pays due homage to the trope of dark novels from God’s own country. 

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Haiku Foundation, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site  The Small Sublime found here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience" by Jennifer Higgie

The act of self-reflection is an indulgence and one that women throughout history have seldom had the opportunity to do, more often being the object of scrutiny and worship by the male gaze. Women who flew contra to convention, female artists who rebelled against stereotype and chose introspection over objectification, have their unique stories told in this book: "A painting is a pause in life's cacophony. It does not demand conversation or justification. It does not hector her. She has stilled herself for it. It cannot and will not tell her what to do. She controls it. She concentrates, her paintbrush in hand, the mirror close by. She is defiantly, splendidly, bravely, heartbreakingly, joyously alone."

Higgie takes us on a tour of time, place, social expectations and gender battles to uncover the lives of women who dared to paint, despite objections and difficult circumstances. Reading from our present perspective, it is hard to imagine women artists being rejected from academies, refused from attending life classes or painting their own bodies, their work spurned and excluded from galleries. They often worked in secret, hoarding their work and making a record of their life for themselves only. Painting was a deeply personal act, which involved recording every stage of an aging process and for some their downfall into obscurity. Very few women made it to recognition and success. Many of these names are not known to the public and Higgie takes time to give them their due: "She looks at herself in order to study what she's made of, to understand herself anew and, from time to time, to rage against the very thing that confines and defines her."

Recent technologies have enabled wrongly-attributed works to be recognised as works by women painters. The catalogue of once-unknown artists is expanding and allowing us a better understanding of the challenges they overcame and the prejudices they faced. History is told in words and more often written by men allowing this gap in our knowledge to happen. Many of our well-known masters had patrons who bought, displayed and championed their careers. This was highly unlikely to happen if the painter was female; she was more likely to be derided for shunning marriage, motherhood and domesticity. Only two of the artists explored in this book have found recent recognition: Frida Kahlo and Artemisia Gentileschi. The rest are ours to discover. 

Most of us have some knowledge of the pain and suffering that Kahlo had to overcome after a serious accident on tram as a young girl, the endless operations, miscarriages and consequent body-disfiguring impacts on her female from. These experiences are embedded into her visceral paintings, blunt self-portraits and graphic imagery. Gentileschi too had to overcome the horrific experience of repeated rape by her art tutor and endure a seven-month trial where she was tortured to prove her innocence. This manifested in her allegory paintings of religious scenes, often reinterpreted from the female perspective. To view these artworks without prior knowledge of the life experiences of the painter is to only half see them. With this book we begin to peel back the layers of each image and understand it better: "A painting will always reveal something about the life of its creator, even if it’s the last thing the artist intended. A self–portrait isn’t simply a rendering of an artist’s external appearance: it’s also an evocation of who she is and the times she lives in, how she sees herself and what she understands about the world."

In her chapter aptly named "The Liberating Looking Glass," Higgie explores the development of self-reflection. A relatively modern invention, mirrors were a luxury item; made from highly polished volcanic glass, they were like gazing into black water. Leonardo da Vinci was obsessed with mirrors, both as objects and metaphors and said: "The mind of the painter should be like a mirror which always takes the colour of the thing it reflects." What such an object meant for a female artist was freedom; the ability to paint in isolation, have an ever-ready muse and to take time to become proficient: "A self-portrait is not only a description of concrete reality, it is also an expression of an inner world."

These stories are fascinating; 500 years of decadence and revolution, nobility and poverty, art movements and politics. You do not need to be an art lover or an art connoisseur to appreciate tales of women battling against the odds to create a realistic image of their own identity. In a time of the ubiquitous shared selfie, we need to understand the huge challenges these women overcame, in capturing a single expression that was often hidden from the public for decades. As Alice Neel writes, "When you're an artist, you're searching for freedom. You never find it because there ain't any freedom. But at least you search for it. In fact, art should be, could be called 'the search.'"

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything" by Claire Harman

 

Written in the centenary of the death of Katherine Mansfield, this book looks to explore the short life and short works of this writer. She lived with the shadow of TB in her lungs but the desire to taste and feel everything: "The passion I feel, takes place of religion - it is my religion - of people - I create my people - of ‘life’ - it is Life."

Mansfield pioneered "fragmented narratives" of so-called "small things." The immobility she faced through frequent bouts of illness slowed her to a pace of stillness, into a space of noticing. She found joy in the small, the personal, in intimate human interactions. Using notes from her diaries released posthumously, against her wishes, this book exposes the details, desires and delicious nuggets of her thoughts and experiences. We delve deeper into a fascinating life: living in many countries, Mansfield was friends with D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf; she had many lovers of both sexes, a hushed pregnancy, and an affair in Paris in the height of WW1; and she even dabbled in walk-on parts in the early movies.

In this book Harman hand selects just ten short stories, unpicking the layers and running a real-time narrative of her life at the time of writing the piece. This gives the reader a valuable insight into the facets of life that affected and shaped the author. Her expedition into Māori territory in 1907, as only one of four females, was daring and enlightening for an eighteen-year-old girl in Edwardian times, but it gave her first-hand experience of the native peoples of her New Zealand home. 

Going out alone at sunset to admire the sunset she wrote about "the long, sweet steel-like clouds against the pale blue, the hills full of gloom, a little river with a tree beside it, burnished silver like the sea." Into this scene slipped a beautiful Māori girl, "her charm in the dusk, the very dusk incarnate." This material was later utilised in her short story "How Pearl Button was Kidnapped" and although the word Māori is never mentioned, the protagonists are dark in contrast to Pearl's white skin and blonde hair. Mansfield draws on the reader's prejudices of "others" and the use of an unreliable, infant narrator, allowing this piece to explore our fears and assumptions about race. This use of a third-person voice, allowing room for personal interpretation and allusion worked well for Mansfield and was adopted in other works to great effect.

Her marriage and the many relationships that Mansfield had through her life were a great source for her stories. This was a topic she dipped into in several pieces. All Sorts of Lives investigates one particular story, written in 1915, just weeks after she had made a reckless rendezvous in occupied territories to meet her lover, Francis Carco. "An indiscreet Journey" is a comment on war but with a unique female perspective.

Mansfield uses a mix of tenses to describe the journey into a war zone, so we get a real-time narrative of the character’s thoughts and emotions on seeing the effects of war. Never published in her lifetime, the posthumous piece gives an insight into the writer’s life. whilst in Paris, she experienced the first bombing raids of Zeppelin airships and later wrote: "The night was bright with stars … I never thought of Zeppelins until I saw a rush of heads and bodies turning upwards as the 'Ultimate Fish' passed by, flying high with fins of silky grey."

The contextualising of this story in relation to Mansfield’s life makes it even more poignant. She had also recently rekindled a relationship with her younger brother "Chummie," who then enlisted and went off to France. This closeness was short-lived as he was only there a few days before suffering a fatality when demonstrating a hand grenade. The shock of losing her brother so abruptly must have given an extra dimension to the horrors she witnessed in Paris and gives us a new perspective on the internal monologue of the character in "An Indiscreet Journey."

Harman also provides fascinating insights into the sour relationship Mansfield had with her loyal companion Ida. The dog-like devotion she held throughout the rough friendship and poor treatment at Mansfield's hands became the kernel of her story, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel." Mansfield wrote it at the end of her life, suffering in great pain. In a flurry of activity, she finished it in the middle of the night. Calling Ida to make them both a cup of tea she said, "Shall I read it to you? It's about you." A story about coercive control, lost youth and regrets, highlighting the inaction and loss of confidence that continue long after the control is gone, is not a complimentary piece to write about her most faithful friend, housekeeper and nurse: "She gave me the gift of herself ... I ought to have made a happy being of her. I ought to have proved my own worthiness of a disciple - but I didn't."

Harman says, "Being able to take what you need 'from life' and avoid, or resist, overstating it is an incredible power for a writer, and one Mansfield made use of time and again." The subheading of this book takes the nub of this idea, The Art of Risking Everything. Mansfield herself said, "The truth is one can get only 'so much' into a story; there is always sacrifice. One has to leave out what one knows and longs to use." The extensive inclusion, therefore, of diary notes, personal correspondence, family photographs and period details in this book helps to retell the wider story of Mansfield's life and loves and the creation of her "little moments." 

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Zine magazine and The Arts Council and she writes her own blog, Small Sublime here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "The Living Mountain" by Nan Shepherd

This is such a light book, wrapped in a simple white and gold jacket, so unassuming and yet what a glorious explosion of colour, sound, texture and life tucked inside it. I'd heard great things about this book, the author's name often dropped by other great nature writers, such as Robert Macfarlane, Kerry Andrews, Rebecca Solnit. This tiny gem of sublime prose written at the end of the Second World War, hidden from publication for thirty years, labelled as 'mineral memoried' by Macfarlane, is a must for the bookshelf - a gift that will keep giving every time you read it.

Anna (Nan) Shepherd was also a tiny woman, slight in stature but mighty in voice. She began, like all visitors to the Cairngorms, seeking height, conquering peeks to look down on the valleys, but she began to understand them as one whole body and spent time on this body, not subduing it: 'I knew when I'd looked for a long time, that I had hardly begun to see.'

Each chapter breaks down her experiences into the senses rather than scenery; air, water, frost and snow are exquisitely explored and lead to the final chapter on just 'being.' She fully believed that time spent with her mountains led to a life of the senses, lived so purely that 'the body may be said to think.' Each foot placed and lifted was an act of breathing. This interplay of perception and reception is unique, slowing down the pedestrian to explore the person: 'I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.'

The introduction by Macfarlane calls the mountains Shepherd's 'inland island.' Her book is a love letter to her experiences. She called her book a 'traffic of love,' and she sends love from the mountains through her words to us - using her eyes to feel. 'How can I number the ways which the eye gives me entry? - the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces.'

Shepherd also understood that there are many perspectives when faced with such a wide vista. David Hockney noted that we see more than one focal point within one view. She revels in this change from moment to moment as mist and low cloud can shift the landscape at alarming speed. Often this leads to misconception as the eye is tricked by every rock, branch, or boulder. This serves to remind the walker that 'One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable.'

War itself makes no appearance in this book as she leaves home to avoid any news of it, but she does mention the fatalities on her mountains; including the aircraft crew who misjudged the difficulty of the terrain and a party of school children who were caught by a sudden change of weather: 'Some are not rescued. A man and girl are found, months too late, far out of their path, the girl on abraded hands and knees as she crawled her way through drift. I see her living face still. (She was one of my students).'

The mountain is not always a friend but is constant and in a world of tumultuous change, it must have been a welcome diversion. In these times of difficult challenges, we all need a place to turn to that will steady us, a path to tread that will keep us moving forwards: 'I have discovered my mountain - its weathers, its airs and lights, its singing burns, its haunted dells, its pinnacles and tarns, its birds and flowers, its snows, its long blue distances.'

Read this book and you too might discover its treasures.

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by CommaPress, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Zine magazine and The Arts Council and she writes her own blog, Small Sublime.

Review by Tracey Foster of "Wanderers: A History of Women Walking" by Kerri Andrews

"I like going from one lighted room to another - such is my brain to me. Lighted rooms and the walks in the fields are corridors" - Virginia Woolf.

Woolf was a passionate walker, a stroller of London Streets, an observer, gathering mental notes of the comings and goings she witnessed there. This was all great material for writing. She admitted in her correspondence to constructing the whole of To the Lighthouse whilst walking round Tavistock Square. Pacing, timing of key moments throughout a text, matters to all novelists but in Woolf's case the pacing was literal and physical. The freedom she felt when pounding the streets was an absolute liberation for her and other gentrified women of the period. She could rebuke social expectations and constrictions and wander freely amid other classes, eavesdropping on conversations and exploring characters at first hand. Woolf plucked ripe material like fruit off a loaded tree: "I keep thinking of different ways to manage my scenes; conceiving endless possibilities, seeing life as I walk about the streets, an immersive opaque block of material to be conveyed by me into its equivalent of language."

Andrews's book delves into the lives of ten women who were passionate wanderers: strong, empowered, tenacious females who threw the rule book out. Fear has always been a barrier, the one thing stopping all females from just setting off. The solo male had no such obstacles, men like Wainwright, who wandered over hill and dale, staying out till dusk, knocking on strangers' doors to ask for a bed for the night. Our history books are full of such examples, Wordsworth, R. L. Stevenson, Rousseau, Keats and Coleridge. Andrews aims to put the record straight with this book, delving into 300 years of women walking to discover themselves: adventurers, writers and poets. 

These include women like Dorothy Wordsworth, a more accomplished hiker than her brother, who completed much more arduous journeys. While her brother was lauded for his poetry, she was ridiculed for being unfeminine; her strong physical presence was an affront to the ideal female form and her activities seen as ungraceful. She dismissed this and revelled in the chance to walk outdoors: "I seem to be drawn more closely to nature in such places; or rather I feel more strongly the power of nature over me, and I am better satisfied with myself for being able to find enjoyment in what unfortunately to many persons, is either dismal or insipid."

Robert McFarlane noted that "walking is not the action by which one arrives at knowledge; it is itself the means of knowing." For Dorothy, the moors offered her freedom and the chance to fully find herself. Rebecca Solnit, a compulsive wanderer, observed this male dominance of the field in her book Wanderlust and is proved correct when we peruse any bookshelf; authors of words on walking are more than 90% male. She states: "Legal measures, social mores ascribed to both men and women, the threat implicit in sexual harassment and rape itself have all limited women's ability to walk where and when they wished. Even the English language is rife with words and phrases that sexualize women's walking."

Despite this, women have walked and written about it passionately but mostly in private correspondence with others. This book eavesdrops on their thoughts, emotions and discoveries. Some of these women turned pedestrian to escape very rigid lives or confinement. Ellen Weeton explored the hills of Lancashire to escape an unhappy marriage and abusive husband. Harriet Martineau had been confined to bed by illness for five years, and used her newfound legs to explore the whole Lake District. Anais Nin sought solace from depression on the streets of New York and Paris. These women took ownership of their health and wellbeing and recorded their progress intimately and passionately: "Ultimately,  the vitality, variety and significance of the different ways of walking of seeing, of ‘being,’ articulated by these women require us to re-evaluate  our walking history,  because that history has always been written by women."

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Zine Magazine and The Arts Council and she writes her own blog, Small Sublime. Her work is currently on exhibition at the Ikon Gallery.

Review by Tracey Foster of "Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art": Exhibition at the Barbican

 

Textiles are vital to our lives. We are swaddled in them when we’re born, we wrap our bodies in them every day and we’re shrouded in them when we die.*

The symbiosis of text and textiles is as old as mankind itself. The allegorical text of storytelling draws from man's skill to clothe himself: the weaving of a plot, fabricating a narrative and the thread of a story, draw from fireside tales passed on while sewing and mending garments. Our ability to create both fabrics and fantasies has enabled us to record our stories in word and weaving. The current exhibition at the Barbican, Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles and Art, has curated a vast range of examples from different cultures and viewpoints that explore the ability of fabrics to record our narrative through touch. 

Entangled in a textile are the knowledge systems of Indigenous people, who for centuries have used thread as a means for communication - to share information, to tell stories and express themselves.

A single dyed thread of indigo cotton expresses a multitude of connotations - of empire, colonial ruling and enslaved peoples - and at one point was said to be in equal in value to the people who slaved to produce it. Textile artists have explored this tale by deconstructing dyed garments to their constituent parts and remodelling them into exhibition pieces, using stitch, applique and embellishments. The artist's mark making, like words layered upon the cloth, trace the tale of our recent histories. Stitching through time has been a subversive act, a mostly female occupation, and seen as the default setting for the demure, domestic members of the household. Young girls were taught needle work from the age of five and expected to learn contrition by being silently contemplative. The bent female head was often portrayed in paintings and tapestries throughout early periods. These females learnt to bend the rules even whilst being compliant - for example, by depicting midwives at the nativity scene despite their presence being banned by the ruling church. Defiance in diligence became a way for them to express themselves, using the power of the needle when the pen was denied to them. This act has transcended ages and has seen modern textile artists continue to express emotions and defy conservative views through fabrics.

Stitching can be a subversive act: thread can work as a language to challenge fixed ideas and voice free expressions.

Tracey Emin’s quilt, No chance, allowed her to voice her feelings as a thirteen-year-old girl in 1977, the year she was raped. Old blankets and clothing were used to express these emotions and combine home comforts with the raw truth of her experiences; the decision to pick out the powerful text in a homely blanket stitch conveys the duality of safety and violation. 

For Judy Chicago’s Birth tear/tear embroidery, she collaborated with over 150 women to share birth experiences of the mythical, the celebratory and the painful to create a visceral response to the iconoclastic images of the virgin birth. Her method of using nine needles at a time each with three threads emulates the numerical symbolism of the holy trinity and the stitching following painful childbirth. 

T. Vinoja’s Border and Bunker explores her experiences of the Sri Lankan Civil War, creating aerial maps informed by her own memories and the testimonies of others. Stitches and salvaged textiles form borders, excavation routes, tents, checkpoints, bunkers and burial sites. During the war, she and her father used clothes to craft bunkers and temporary shelters by filling used saris with earth. She has spoken of the individual stitches as reparative sutures, emulating how fabric was used as first-aid to wrap and cover wounds.

Textiles are part of our everyday routines — they are in close contact with our bodies and our homes, they are used, felt, touched and seen. As such, the material is invested with personal narratives, making it uniquely suited to communicate the intricacies and complexities of lived experience.

Not all the contributors to the exhibition are female as men also turn to fabrics to explore their feelings and express their frustrations of conforming to male stereotypes. They use a perceived feminine artform to play with expectations and social narratives.

Women, men and nonbinary artists have both resisted and reclaimed these limiting approaches to the medium, questioning gendered and value-based binaries and using the act of stitching as a radical practice.

Jeffery Gibson drew from his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and traditional powwow ceremonies, particularly those worn by the Northern Paiute people as spiritual protection in the pacifist Ghost Dance movement, in order to explore his identity as gay man. He plays with the nonbinary gender roles found in many indigenous cultures and his garments are deliberately ungendered.

Politics and art have always been unique companions; this is demonstrated nowhere more simply than the blank wall gaps where artist work has been withdrawn because of the current war in Gaza. Exhibition, explanation and discussion have always been the point of creative artwork, to open dialogue and demand a further look at the intended focus. This exhibition allows a dialogue to be created across cultures, genders, stereotypes and societal norms. Long may the thread be an advocate for communication and understanding. Long may we see more artists using textiles to tell their individual stories.

*Italicised quotations are taken from the exhibition catalogue.

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Zine magazine and The Arts Council and she writes her own blog, Small Sublime. Her work is currently on exhibition at the Ikon Gallery. 

Review by Tracey Foster of "Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain" by Matthew Green

Imagining our home, town and local landscape as a wasteland; envisaging the future for our sea-ravaged coasts and climate-battered green spaces is a real prospect that we face today. Matthew Green makes this all the more possible with this well researched book as he takes on a journey through existing derelict sites here on our own British soils. These include places simply eradicated through disease, plagues, coastal erosion, storm surges and land acquisition, leaving us with a ghost map of former communities. Green, a historian, writer and broadcaster, knows how to tell a good tale and evokes a sublime sense of the uncanny with descriptions of visits to these sites. Abandoned homes, half-shelled churches, submerged dwellings and fake buildings make ideal sites to set a horror movie.

The cult of the picturesque began in the eighteenth century and the hunt for the ideal gothic ruin set the middle classes wandering over our own local sites of abandonment. Prior to this no one cared enough to notice and nature was left to take over where man had fled. The passion for old antiquities saw an outbreak of "ruin poetry," waxing lyrical about the joys of the desolation and pathos that surrounded such sites. Old ruins became national monuments and were put back on the maps. The romantic movement that followed revelled in the desolate, evoking reverie to ponder life, death, longing, absence and mourning. One such place to inspire scores of collections of poetry was Dunwich, Britain's lost Atlantis. This was a whole city built on the Suffolk coast, comprising several large churches and a thriving port. A series of huge storm surges eroded the cliffs beneath it and its demise was recorded in early photographs and newspaper reports. The sad sight of a graveyard tumbling onto the rocks below brought many visitors to the site, to write, paint and muse on life's fragility. The writer Henry James being one of them, this prompted him to say: "Sadness hung in the air like the salt spray of the sea; a sense of squandered potential pervaded everything and yet was somehow uplifting."

Green also gets special permission to visit the military training zones on Norfolk. This was land acquired during WW2 that encompassed several old villages on the promise to return them after the war. Several residents left notes pinned to their front door for the army, asking them to take care of their family’s homes in the anticipation of a return. What is left behind now is a ravished wilderness and bombed-out buildings. Very little remains for those families to return to apart from the church where they are allowed back one day a year at Christmas to tend graves and gather to sing hymns: "The path of lime trees leading to the church is specially illuminated and on those bittersweet occasions, the cadences of their song, the streaks of the choir, the gushing of the air through the bellows of the organ effuse from the glowing nave, soaring over the shards, the mounds and the ruins of deserted and disfigured villages, transforming them through the redemptive power of sorrow, and resurrecting them in the theatre of the mind."

What Green did find there was a range of fake building shells, made up in fine detail to replicate medieval Normandy towns, German hamlets, post-war Soviet concrete jungles and even a market town of Basra, simulating the ongoing challenges of today's army recruits: "It was one of the eeriest, most disquieting places I have ever set foot in."

Green travels from the top of Scotland in St Kilda on a journey through lost Britain to the submerged village of Capel Celyn in Wales and takes us with him. Embarking on this journey and in the process losing his father and his marriage, he faced a long period of emotional turmoil: "Ambushed by memories, with the past hanging like a pall in the air, the present seemed so thin as to barely exist at all."

His personal circumstance is in tune with our times. The British psyche, used to change, as our land mass alters and shifts through waves of invasion and geological movement, looks set to face the greatest alteration of all. This book is a fascinating insight into the previous lives that were altered, communities that were lost and the warnings we can take from a long view of nature's reclamation. 

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, Zine magazine and The Arts Council and she writes her own blog, Small Sublime, here. 

Review by Tracey Foster of "Orwell’s Roses" by Rebecca Solnit

In the spring of 1936, a young author set about planting a garden in his rented cottage. Awaiting the arrival of his new wife and hoping to put behind him the experiences as a serving police officer in colonial Burma, Orwell turned to nature to heal both his lungs and calm his mind. His first attempts at recuperation saw him live in extreme poverty, which he later recorded in detail in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. These were places that were a source for great fiction, but it was in the little hamlet of Wallington where he decided to settle his mind.

Solnit begins with Orwell's essay from 1946, "A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray," that focused on the beauty of a mature yew tree which long outlived the vicar that planted it. After a lapse of time, all that is left of him is a comic song and a beautiful tree. From this spark of a thought, Solnit decided to track down Orwell’s cottage garden and see if his plants had also outlived the creator. He had mentioned revisiting his garden in that essay of 1946 and noted that that too had thrived in his absence. The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble.

Orwell was passionate about nature and the earth; he was a keen gardener and a naturalist. He took many long walks with friends who later commented on his knowledge and alluded to his fear for the future, drawing attention, with anxiety, to this shrub budding early for the time of the year. Solnit urges us to revisit and look deeper into Orwell's prose, to seek out the passages of flora and fauna and promises us that if we do, the grey portrait will turn to colour. Even in his novel 1984, deeply political and prophetic, there are moments of joy. Nature itself is immensely political, in how we imagine, interact with, and impact it. He was ahead of his time in this interpretation of our living world. 

Extolling simple manual labour with direct visible results must have appealed to Orwell, a passion that led him to further expand his small holding with animals, an orchard and a vegetable garden. Finding predictability with effort that gardening promises was a complete contrast to the uncertain life of prose. He referred to gardening in his many essays, extolling the virtues of the simple, cheap Woolworth rose, the common toad and country life. He advocates for a simple life, in tune with our surroundings. Solnit sums this up with her phrase: "Even when the agenda was bread, what spills over is roses."

This book takes us on a journey through culture and art to society and socialism to examine how roses have represented our desires, passions and goals through the centuries. Throughout these meanderings, Solnit discusses the written words of the essayist, his humour and humanity, his politics and passions to understand him better.

Orwell finally died of tuberculosis aged just 46 after suffering with bronchitis most of his adult life. His final request was for roses to be planted on his grave: "Outside my work, the thing I care for most is gardening – for like the rest of us, it’s beauty for today, hope for tomorrow."

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature and The Arts Council.  She writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime.

 

Review by Tracey Foster of "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan

 

          Red runs through
          like a weeping wound -
          a scab twice picked.

- Tracey Foster

There's a red thread that runs deeply through Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel. From the very first, we are faced with a stubborn blood blister under the nail that preoccupies the protagonist Dorrigo Evans as a small child and diverts his attention away from a critical act that will come back to haunt him as a middle-aged man. The blister can only be resolved by a red-hot kitchen knife that makes a hole in the nail, a blade with 'globules of fat' that will take on much more sinister appearance during Dorrigo's time as POW in Burma. This is a story of one man's life and death and the connections he makes in between.

          A world of dew
          and in every dew drop
          a world of struggle.

- Issa

Flanagan is an expert at fluctuating between different time frames and takes us from youth to old age and any point in between, weaving a tale that is multi-layered and interconnected. Characters talk to us through the third-person narration as we begin to join up the dots. His paramour, Amy, is first seen wearing a red camellia in her hair and this becomes such a potent symbol that in later life Dorrigo has a camellia bush cut down after he moves to a new house with his family.

          A bee
          staggers out
          of the peony.

- Basho

Flanagan has a personal connection to the torturous conditions the POWs suffered during the building of the Burma railway. His own father was a POW at this time and died on the day that he finished writing the novel. These gruesome, gut-wrenching tales can only come from one who has heard of this first hand. We can only hope that these stories bear witness to a dark period of humanity that we shall never see the likes of again.

          Only the monkeys 
          can laugh - in the heat
          of the jungle.

- Tracey Foster

The title of the novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, takes its cue from the Japanese poet Basho's book of the same name. This poet's journeys and poems became the first form of haibun writing, prose interspersed with haiku. Flanagan drops haiku into the text to break up the chapters and add another layer of emotion to the story. After savagely beating a POW to near death, a guard tells Dorrigo,

          A world of pain
          if the cherry blossoms,
          it blossoms.

- Basho

Guards who dispense relentless barbaric punishments on the POW are shown swapping haiku favourites in their quiet moments displaying a discordant relationship between humanity and nature. The haikus act as rest breaks to the violence, diverting and regrouping our emotions before the next chapter. Later on, another guard is asked to reflect on his life in old age and write a traditional death poem, left behind for his loved ones. As we hope and await absolution he recites

          Winter ice
          melts into clear water.
          Clear is my heart.

This novel is a harrowing tale of love, loss, torture, pain and release. As readers, we long for resolution, a glimpse of a happy ending but as Flanagan emphasises, life is just simply not like that. We take what we can and make the best of things. Maybe that is our strength, to endure and leave behind a tale to tell. This is one tale that Flanagan was born to tell. 

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature and The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "Punk: Rage and Revolution," Leicester Museums and Art Galleries

The current exhibition at Leicester museums and art galleries explores the brief but electrifying period that encompasses the explosion of the punk scene in the UK, with a particular focus on the key movers with connections to Leicester.

On the cusp of being a teenager in 1977, I can clearly remember the shockwaves that followed the death of Elvis Presley and the furore in the news around the end of Rock and Roll. My weekly dose of culture fix watching Top of the Pops showed how torn the nation was, balanced on a record needle between the worlds of disco, cheesy pop, prog rock and punk. The last was a gut reaction against the rest, a rebellion against the norm, the staid and static. Punk was born out of a resistance to the establishment who had screwed up the prospects for its youth, with high unemployment, nationwide strikes, violence in Northern Ireland and financial crashes. This period was epitomised by power strikes and the darkness that we were plunged into. Stuck at home, freezing by candlelight, the time was right for anarchy in the UK.

This exhibition cleverly plunges us back into those times using audio, video and many newspaper clippings. We are transported back to that period to understand the rage and rebellion that emerged from it. Many artefacts have survived from the period and are displayed in conjunction with dialogue that enhances the narrative and brings us the personal. Local voices have contributed to the displays and loaned their own histories to the sets, reliving the period and effect on the city at that time. 

For me, it took me back to my youth and gave clarity to it. Younger visitors may begin to see connections to today and understand the need to have a voice, to make yourself heard. A lack of technology and interconnectivity did not stop the word from spreading in the 70s. Fanzines and press releases made sure that youth culture connected and prospered. Leicester’s scene is fondly remembered and extolled: pubs like The Hind, Princess Charlotte and the Globe welcomed the punks and well-known bands from The Jam, The Clash, The Dammed played at Leicester venues. Creatives from Leicester went on to be involved in the punk fashion scene in London and become the recorders of the time, photographers, photojournalists and movie makers - highly influential names such as David Parkinson, Stephane Raynor, Helen Robinson and Roger K Burton to name a few. Their part in the movement and lasting influences are given credit and much-needed respect from the city that spawned them.

The one element that personally resonated with me was the highlighting of the female voice. Fearless and provocative, Punk set out to empower women in a time of masculine dominance. Girls deliberately set out to create a narrative around ‘what a woman was,’ a rebellion against the male gaze and objectification of the female form that dominated the media and removed our voice. They created band names to deliberately reclaim the gross disrespect for the female body, such as The Slits, Penetration and the Adverts. The Feminist movement started around the same time, but punks became the face of anarchy, a middle finger to the establishment and conformity.  

The 70s was also a period of race riots and the rise of the national front movement. This exhibition also seeks to make connections to the reggae music and collaborations that formed at that time, black and white finding themselves outcast from society and reacting to racism together. Bands like Aswad, UB40 and Steel Pulse found themselves speaking out about injustice and intolerance, and found unity with punks who identified with their message. Bands who covered work from The Clash to The Police led to a resurgence in the Ska movement and united disenfranchised youth further. 

This exhibition is exhaustive and timely, looking back at a period of unrest and  unrivalled creativity that might spark others to reflect upon our current predicament and react accordingly. We can only hope. Rosie Ann Boxall of Soft Touch Arts says: "What excites me most about the exhibition is the conversations that have taken place between the generations. Hopefully we've created an environment where people feel that they can talk to each other.

The exhibition is on at the New Walk Museum and the Soft Touch Arts Centre until 3rd September. A summer programme of events to celebrate this exhibition is planned across August including a Punk Festival Weekender at the O2 Academy. For more info about this exhibition and any other events please follow the link to the website for further videos, interviews, playlist and catalogue bookstore here.

  

About the reviewer
Tracey Foster was too young to be a punk but has set store by its reactive stance ever since and would like to think herself a rebel at heart. She started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by CommaPress, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature and The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site The Small Sublime found here.

Review by Tracey Foster of "Modern Nature" by Derek Jarman

There’s an omnipresent overseer throughout Jarman’s Modern Nature. It manifests in different forms as he switches from daily records of the garden at Prospect Cottage, to a memoir of his childhood and life as a film producer - from the looming presence of Dungeness power station, felt through the thickest fog as his home faced ravaging seas, to the oppressive rule of the teachers at boarding school, ever vigilant for deviant behaviour.

Covering a period from the beginning of 1989 through to September the following year, he begins with the great storm that plunged the cottage into darkness, leaving him with only the beam of the lighthouse to see by. As he watches timbers fly from fishermen’s cottages and hears the wind cry like a banshee around him, he takes us back to Kansas and his nightmare dreams of Oz: "The Wizard of Oz reminds me of the frightening power of movies to move. I’m glad it had a happy ending."

The great city of Emerald, lit up like Dungeness station, is another presence that overshadows the narrative - a hint that we don’t always get what we truly wish for. 

Jarman bought Prospect with his father’s inheritance and moved there when his HIV status became public. The memoir is very poignant as he turned to face his death. Many of his friends had already succumbed to this vicious disease and he must have known that his time was running out as he built a garden in a savage microclimate. Many plants died, succumbed to the salt sprays, turned black and calcified. The temperatures could swing from intense dry heat to bitter blasts, but he persisted and replanted after every storm, gathering stones thrown up by the surges to decorate his patch.  A keen gardener and wide reader, he knew his plants and makes references to their mythical past, cultural symbolism, and power to heal. The prose is beautiful and melancholic: "Today, Dungeness glowed under a pewter sky – shimmering emeralds, arsenic, sap, sage and Verdigris greens washed bright, moss in little islands set off against pink pebbles, glowing yellow banks of gorse, the deep russet of dead bracken, and pale ochre of reeds in clumps set against the willow spinney."

This symphony of colour, intense like no other landscape, is filmic and harks back to the technicolour washes of Oz. A film-maker throughout, he sets scene after scene for us and is mindful of our reaction. During this period of writing, he was also filming War Requiem and includes the scene of poppies from the garden, buzzing with bees.

          Scarlet Poppies
          This is a Poppy
          A flower of cornfield and wasteland
          Bloody red
          Sepals Two
          Soon falling
          Petals four
          Stamens many
          Stigma rayed
          Many seeded
          For sprinkling on bread
          The staff of life
          Woven in wreaths
          In memory of the dead
          Bringer of dreams
          And sweet forgetfulness. 

I can clearly remember the towering black obelisk of 1980s public information films, warning us about the AIDS epidemic. A newly-qualified teacher at the time, I was working under the shadow of Section 28 which forbade schools from "promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." Jarman’s experience of the prejudices and persecution he faced during this period whilst watching his friends "shrivel and parch like the landscape" is harrowing. From his refuge at Prospect, the nature is encompassing and assuaging but also a grim reminder that our time in the garden is finite. The debris he collects from the shores after high tides is dragged back and used to create a sculpture garden of decay, where distorted metal hums to the sound of bees - inspiring him to paint and write.

          No dragons will spring from these circles.
          These stones will not dance or clap hands at the solstice.
          Beached on the shingle,
          They lock up their memories,
          Upright as sentinels
          In the dry grass.

Name dropping throughout his close contacts and work diary, this book will appeal to anyone who is interested in media of the period, but it is the plants who steal the show. It is they he turned to at the end of his day and Prospect Cottage that was his refuge at the end of his life.

About the reviewer

Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine and The Arts Council.