...an ache in each welcoming kiss, Maria Isakova Bennett
Maytree Press, 2019 £6.00
The sacred language of fine art
This collection engages with seventeen art works in Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery and Port Sunlight’s Lady Lever Gallery.
These are not simple ekphrastic poems of appreciation or description. They are prayerful negotiations between individual paintings and the way they hold our gaze and influence perceptions and feelings.
The opening poem is a meditation on Jean Marchand’s ‘Nocturne’. It conveys the art world’s territory of pain and sacredness. The gallery has become a place of prayer in which we cannot pray. At the same time, it is personified: it is ‘dizzy’ and longing to break out:
In room ten you want to kneel to pray
but words won’t come
and the gallery is dizzy tonight —
the tug of a boat at Heurteauville,
flat sands, a low tide
a tumult of sky at Egremont.
The direct address of the poem (‘you’) allows both inclusiveness and welcome as the reader is invited to engage directly with Marchand’s painting — ‘consider a bouquet imprisoned in the corner’. The idea of the painted object as ‘imprisoned’ reflects the earlier concept of the ‘dizzy’ gallery wanting to escape into the open world.
This desire for freedom is revisited in meditations on other paintings. For example, ‘His Icon’ places the garment on the model in Brockhurst’s ‘Jeunesse Dorée’ within our grasp:
the unflappable grey cardigan,
its gape and tug between the fast hold
of each button
Again, in the final lines of ‘Novena before Singer Sargent’ — the speaker ‘(needs) the promise of a boat / the swirl of a troubled tide’. In fact, the poet continually suggests the need to break boundaries, and even the frames of our own bodies:
where night is absorbed into morning,
where the sound of the tide
is soothing white noise;
where there are no borders —
[…]
where there is no distinction
between memory and dream:
we pour ourselves
[‘Reliquary’]
Maria Isakova Bennett is a translator between forms. In this pamphlet, she translates fine art paintings into poems of experience, elegy, reverence and sensual longing.