The Print Museum
There’s a
whole other language for the foundling industry of letterpress, and in the
heyday of making an imprint on a page, that language informed us in the most
transformative and progressive way. It
ran deep, the revolution. Now, the
physical act of making pages has gone, and with it a profoundly human as well
as an industrial history. And passion,
print is a quiet passion – and that is what emerges through Heidi Williamson’s
collection of poems, The Print Museum
published by Bloodaxe
This is a
book of love from a deft and disciplined poet at the height of her powers, a
worthy winner of the East Anglian Book Awards. Williamson’s beautiful, tender
journey through the thins and leads of print is a journey with her father, a
retired printer, and the result of her three-year residency at the John Jarrold
Printing Museum, in Norwich. It tells history like a string of beads,
industrial, personal, familial, universal and human and memory like a glaze, a
sieve, a mirror.
The span
(another printing term), of Williamson’s writing is deceptive. We can be in a small space with a crowd of
letters but inked through is an entire history, or an idea, which is so simple
but so right and so well put, it is perfect.
I can get ridiculously excited about the conjunction of words – boring
everyone I know by repeating the brilliant simplicity of Shakespeare’s ‘the
hollow crown,’ a complete embodiment of kingship when death and betrayal was
easy – but Williamson does this too. She
is questioning, philosophical, existential, gently mischievous, tender,
experimental, sensuous, and so, so smart.
‘They say
the weight of a full Kindle/is as slight as the weight of a man’s soul,
That the
substance of a Tweet/decays in just three hours:/Do words weigh less in
cyberspace? (Furniture)…
There are
fantastic first lines:
‘He tended
that machine like his own sorrow.’
‘My mother
had two mouths./ One was for saying./The other was for not saying.’
I can’t
recommend this collection more highly.
It will enhance your reading life.
The Print Museum, Heidi Williamson,
Bloodaxe Books, 2016
Bird Sisters by Julia Webb is a quest to
understand the tangle of family and especially the river of a relationship that
runs between siblings. This is a brave
book, a tense, personal evocation of life in a family overshadowed by the rule
of a ‘Sun Father’, and his punitive severity blighting the lives of the
children – and the shadowy orbit of ‘Moon Mother.’ Webb conjures childhood
memories into enchanted, surreal motifs that fuse with the authentic detail of
the everyday. We are carried through the
universe, only to land in a snatched sexual encounter outside the chicken
abattoir, which twists into a mythical transformation.
To me, as a
reader, I found the prose poems, the accounts of things that happened at home,
compelling, like The Piano Lesson –
(refused by Daddy), Lent and Rain.
This is a world of slights, longings and cruelties, darkness and
difficulty, spiky, complex relationships, and acts, however small, of a
rebellion and resilience. There are
wonderful images, ‘Her mother darns the window.’ - ‘Like a baby dandled on the knee of the
sea.’ And lines that completely twine the natural world, the local, regional,
recognizable world into the being of the characters that populate this
collection – ‘you send your snaggle fingers down/into Breckland’s thin
soil/snare rabbits in the net of your tresses.’ (From the Same Cloth).
This is an
intriguing book, myth and miasma, real and sobering, as if the writer is still
puzzling it all out. A great read.
Bird Sisters, Julia Webb, Nine Arches
Press, 2016.
Reviews by Belona Greenwood, founder and co-organiser of Words and Women. A former journalist she took an MA in Scriptwriting at the University of East Anglia and writes plays for adults and children, produced and performed both regionally and nationally. She is co-director of Chalk Circle Theatre Company. In 2009 she was a winner of the Decibel Penguin Prize for Life Writing, and she has won an Escalator award to write a book of creative non-fiction. She teaches adults and children.
Reviews by Belona Greenwood, founder and co-organiser of Words and Women. A former journalist she took an MA in Scriptwriting at the University of East Anglia and writes plays for adults and children, produced and performed both regionally and nationally. She is co-director of Chalk Circle Theatre Company. In 2009 she was a winner of the Decibel Penguin Prize for Life Writing, and she has won an Escalator award to write a book of creative non-fiction. She teaches adults and children.
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