Tag Archives: photography

January Floods: Scant Magazine

This post is going up a little later than planned. Back in January Scant launched its first issue with an exhibition of work from the magazine at Saan Gallery in Manchester. The magazine brings together poetry and photography that responds to the scantness and transience of our present time: a moment of ecological deterioration and destruction, and of economic and cultural precarity. I have a poem, ‘In Anticipation of the Flood’, and a series of linked photographs published in the first issue, alongside brilliant poetry by Tom Branfoot, Joey Frances, and Purbasha Roy, amongst others, and arresting images from Lucy Ridges, Natasha Javadine, and Sarah Russell (to name just some of the photographers).

A picture of flood damage in Didsbury where the River Mersey punched a hole in the high river path and forged a new route through the allotments and Rugby Club.

In a strange, haunting moment of synchronicity, the publication of Scant and my images (poetic and photographic) of flood and its polluted aftermath, coincided with a new wave of floods in Didsbury where I live. On New Year’s Day the river Mersey rose in a powerful torrent, more quickly and fiercely than anyone had anticipated. As well as flooding homes and carrying away parked cars (a devastating start to the year for many), it punched a yawing hole in the high path above the river – ripping trees up by their roots, swamping allotments, rugby pitches, and golf courses, and forging a new route for itself through the city.

When people’s homes have been damaged, this might seem like the least of a community’s worries. But when the Mersey floods, the plains around Fletcher Moss also become marked by the shameful detritus of our polluting lives, which usually lies hidden at the bottom of the river bed. The branches of trees become garlanded with plastic bags, Tampax and dog poo bags (like unholy, inverted Clootie trees), and the paths are littered with plastic containers, rusted bicycle wheels, and other discarded, household items. My poem and photograph series for Scant explore the attraction and repulsion of the stagnant water of the flooded park, its surface coated with shimmering oil slicks.

My photographs of polluted patterns in the water, as published in Scant

You can purchase Scant issue 1 from a number of brilliant bookshops, including the UniTom store and Jot Bookshop in Manchester, and Good Press Bookshop in Glasgow. An interview with Scant’s editors Sam Rye and Jack McKenna was also recently published on the Corridor8 website.

Here’s a little snippet of my poem from the issue, as a sign-off:

After dark the water burns,

fire on stagnant flood, rusted

grilles curdle misplaced Mersey

silt, stopped currents and lurid

orange clouds, a sky you might

fall into […]

From ‘In Anticipation of the Flood’

Beachcombed Assemblages

I’ve been referring to these ‘creations’ as photo collage poems, but it occurs to me now that this is a little unwieldy in its eclectic hybridisation of forms. So, some of my ‘beachcombed assemblages’ have been published by SJ Fowler over on 3AM Magazine as part of the Poem Brut series. You can read/view them here.

Screenshot of the assemblages as they appear on 3AM Magazine

These little artefacts and poem-objects combine photographs of things encountered on the beach with found text arranged on the surface of the photo in a kind of collage. I began making them when I was struggling with writers’ block and longing to be by the sea, as if the unrequited impulse to walk the coast was somehow tied up with the frustrated impulse to write.

Screenshot of the assemblages as they appear on 3AM Magazine

The Poem Brut series is a real treasure trove of visual poetry and poem-objects. Here is Jules Sprake with forms that combine printmaking and poetry, ink sculptures by Agata Maslowska, stitched found visual poetry by Laura Davis, palimpsests, typewriter poems, asemic writing and much more. You can explore the full Poem Brut archive here.

Here’s the text I wrote to accompany my three beachcombed assemblages:

Each of these visual poems is a multitemporal document that begins with a walk on a beach in search of objects of interest to photograph and ends with the beachcombing of a collection of found texts in search of phrases. These found phrases, reassembled on the surface of the photograph, re-enliven the images during periods of time when I am far from the beach and longing to return. In moments of landlock and heightened desire for the meditative pleasures of walking the coastline, I return to my photographs. These photographs are a part of the record I keep of rare beach walks. When I return to this record in my Manchester flat, it gives me a renewed sense of the surreal and mysterious quality of things encountered at the edge of the tide. The collage poems I create on the surface of these photographs are responsive but also impulsive: they rely on a randomness that is in tune with the chance discoveries made on the beach.

Poem Brut #159