The Book of Sand Project

When I visited Slack Space last week, I  met Karen Dennison, whose work had been included.. Karen is a poet, and currently studying on the MA Design and the Book at Colchester. Karen has a wonderful collection of poems published in Counting Rain, (Indigo Dreams Publishing,2012).

The review by Bill Greenwell describes the book so accurately "this is a skillful, perfectly disarming series of pieces, in which disquiet and tension lie just beneath the surface, held there carefully while the writer investigates moments of loss,love, discovery..."

I particuraly loved this one:

Ideas of Silence

I
Silence pulls him into icy water
Thoughts like knives being sharpened
make him breathless. Choking
on nothingness, death,
he drags himself to solid ground
where the sound warms him like sunshine.

II
For her silence is not just an absence.
It exsists in the space bettween all solid things
- it is moonlight and sunlight
bathing her skin. She floats in silence
in the timeless place where memories live;
shadows dancing in glass.

III
Silence slips throuh my fingers
like silverfish, swims into darkness.
I close my eyes to follow
but the house creaks, thoughts buzz,
exsistence hums. Pressing the earth
to my ear, I hear the dead breathing.

More about Karens work can be found at kdennison.wordpress.com

Karen is presently co ordinating a project where poets and artists are invited to respond to a short story 'The Book of Sand' by Jorge Luis Borges. This is a starting point from which a poet will make a response. This poem is then  passed  to an artist to make an image. This image is then passed to another poet, and so on. It will be interesting to see how the poems/images evolve, and how far it moves from the original starting point.

I have been invited to respond to the first poem by Emer Gillespie. Above is the image I have selected. While the poem is very descriptive, I did not want to be too literal, and so responded to just a few lines sugestive of a dark atmosphere.After some deliberation,  I opted not to include the figure,instead favouring the symbol of the door.
 
The lines I felt particuarly drawn to include "Evening winding down...despite the fear...a gust of elsewhere...outside the howling darkenss" I wanted to capture something of the night, of the darkening wind, and a stranger who brings uncertainty.