Words Unlimited

Book of The Month - December

This is the story of Robert Grainier, an itinerant worker in the American West at the start of the twentieth century. He fells trees, joins gangs that build bridges across deep valleys for the coming railways. He’s a man of uncertain origins – an orphan? – and a man of few words. He marries late and has child, building a log cabin out in the woods.

So far, so unremarkable? Except strange and horrific things occur in Grainier’s life. Through a combination of spare prose, moments of lyric intensity and laconic dialogue Johnson imbues each episode with a veracity that, at times, makes this feel as if it is fiction wrought from the researched facts of someone’s life.

The context for Granier’s story is vividly evoked -  the landcapes of Washington State, Idaho, Wyoming at a time of transition from the pioneer, ‘Wild West’ days, to the coming of railways and modernity. As Granier’s life plays out the twentieth century gathers pace around him. Early on he sleeps in a tent left over from the Civil War, yet towards the end sees Elvis Presley waving from a train.

I recently saw an exhibition that explored Henri Cartier Bresson’s idea of the decisive moment in photography - that second when the photographer captures a potent image full of story, inviting the viewer to extrapolate backwards and forwards from it. Each of the episodes in Train Dreams is a decisive moment in Grainier’s life. Johnson depicts each one as sparingly but as potently as is possible.

From this material he could have created a 500 page epic. Instead, by moving through selected incidents, vividly shown, Johnson packs the life into under 120 pages. Is this a novella, a collection of linked short stories or a novel? It’s an epic in miniature. The climax, when it comes, is breathtaking, heartbreaking. I felt I should have seen it coming. The brilliance of this book is that I didn’t. It’s impact stayed with me for days.   

Light for the Darkest Day

Mariko Mori: Rebirth, Burlington Gardens, Until 17 February 2013 

Anyone in central London looking to escape Christmas frenzy or the end of the world – due today, apparently –  would do well to head for the Royal Academy in Burlington Gardens and this wonderful exhibition by New York based Japanese artist Mariko Mori

This is work to calm and rebalance the mind, inviting reflection on life’s cycle of death and rebirth, and our connection to the natural world.

Mariko Mori Tom Na H-Iu II, 2005-06. © Mariko Mori Studio Photo: Richard Learoyd

 

When I visited earlier this week I could have stayed for hours in the room with Tom Na-Iu II. The large totem stands alone in a white room, pulsing with light. Five metres high, it is lit from within by hundreds of LED lights and connected to Super Kamiokande, Institute for Cosmic Ray Research at The University of Tokyo. The observatory, apparently, detects neutrinos emitted by the sun and other such phenomena which the work displays in real time, in constantly changing light patterns. Awesome. Worth the ticket price for this alone.

Fascinated equally by ancient cultures and cutting-edge science, Mori draws on the aesthetics of Shintoism, Buddhism, astronomy, particle physics and technology.  I particularly enjoyed White Hole, to be found in a dark space at the end of a spiraling white corridor. A helpful attendant lights the way for you with a torch.

Whatever transpires on 21 December 2012 – end of the world or start of a new era – either way, sitting with one of Mori’s installations, you’d be in a good place.

On until Sunday 17 February 2013, 10am – 6pm daily (last admission 5.30pm). Late night opening: Fridays until 10pm (last admission 9.30pm) £10 full price, concessions available

For more information visit the website of the Royal Academy, here.

Honouring Dust

Formerly: An Exhibition of Disappearing London

If you’re down on the South Bank in London, it’s worth taking time to catch this exhibition of poems and photographs at the Poetry Library until 3 February 2013 – Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 8pm

Formerly is both a book and an exhibition. It’s a collaboration between poet Tamar Yoseloff and photographer Vici MacDonald. The book contains fourteen of Yoseloff’s poems, each a response to one of MacDonald’s photographs of derelict parts of London. The exhibition puts the book on the wall with enlargements of the words and images.

Since launching the book earlier this year, Yoseloff and MacDonald have revisited each of the locations to collect found objects – such as a cloth rose, a pair of black court shoes, a fragment of brick, a plastic dolphin - and to write up-to-date field notes, all on display. Some of the buildings have disappeared. In place of The Rose pub there is now a car wash.

Talking to MacDonald at the launch last week I was curious to know how her collection of images had begun: ‘As a child I'd get fascinated by doorways, shops, decaying industrial buildings, and "photograph" them with my eyes.’ At art school she started photographing for real and later, ‘when digital came in, I decided to concentrate on shop fronts, with a possible book in mind. I'd make special pilgrimages to places that looked interesting on the map. Or, locations would choose me, as I passed through them.’

Tamar Yoseloff had long admired MacDonald’s photographs, ‘like good poems, they focus on the minute but important details.’

By the time their collaborative project was conceived Yoseloff had plenty of images to choose from, ‘I trawled through hundreds she has taken over the years.’ MacDonald noticed that Yoseloff tended to respond to images that included text and sought more of those out for her to view. And so the process of trawling and selection went on.

Meanwhile, Yoseloff was considering poetic form, 'The sonnet seemed to be perfect – snapshot-sized, but also appropriate for elegy and commemoration.' With that in mind, they eventually settled on the fourteen images for each of which Yoseloff produced a poem. Her sonnets don’t obey all the rules, but as Don Paterson says in his 101 Sonnets, the basic requirement for the modern sonnet is those fourteen lines.

With images chosen and the constraints of form in place it’s still a tall order to ‘commission’ yourself to produce. ‘Narratives and characters suggested themselves as the poems developed,’ Yoseloff recalls.

Tamar Yoseloff at the launch reading 'The Rose.' Added to images and words was a soundscape devised by composer and electronic musician, Douglas Benford

The poems work well as a sequence, the effect is cumulative as words and phrases are repeated in changing contexts. The tone ranges from elegiac, such as in 'Formerly,' to a kind of resilient bravado in ‘Quickie Heel Bar.’ Poems and pictures work together to build atmosphere, character and history. To quote a phrase from ‘Formerly’ this is a project to ‘honour dust.’

Formerly is available in a limited edtion of 300 signed copies, price £8, from Hercules Editions