Description
Reflections Glimmer: poems exploring ekphrasis showcases the work of three poets who each bring their unique perspective to the art of ekphrastic poetry.
Jane Burn’s Epigone presents a personal narrative upon grief, loss, mental health and disability, framed by the poems and prose of the writer and polymath Mervyn Peake. The poems in Maria Schiza’s Facing explore the intersubjectivity of the self and the otherness found within, through paintings by artists such as Turner, Gaugin, and Alison Watt. And Rosamund Taylor’s Brushstroke responds to a range of artistic inspirations, from Stubbs’ ‘Whistlejacket’ to Star Trek: Deep Space 9, examining the primal nature of our creative urge and how it endures in the darkest moments of our lives.
Brought together, the poetry in Reflections Glimmer reminds us of the fundamental importance of art, literature and creativity to our lives, while giving homage to the writers, artists and creatives that inspire us.
Jane Burn is an award-winning poet, illustrator and hybrid writer. She is a working-class person with autism / person with hEDS. Her poems are widely published and anthologised. Her most recent collection is The Apothecary of Flight (Nine Arches, 2024). She lives off-grid in a Northumberland cottage. Jane was the Michael Marks Awards Environmental Poet of the Year 2023/24.
Maria Schiza is a poet and academic from Thessaloniki, Greece. She is currently reading for a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Edinburgh, researching the possibilities of encounter found through ekphrastic poetry. Her recent publications include ‘Figure Studies in London’ in Outcrop Poetry and ‘On Language, Nomads, and the Shifting Shape of Home’ in the Tabula Rasa Review.
Rosamund Taylor’s debut collection, In Her Jaws (Banshee Press 2022), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. Widely published, her work has appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Fourteen Poems, MsLexia, Poetry Ireland Review, The Rialto and The Stinging Fly. She is the winner of the Telegraph Poetry Prize 2023, The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2020 and the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry 2017. She lives in Dublin with her wife.
Why Whistlejacket?
After Whistlejacket, George Stubbs (1762)
Not because he’s a horse
but because he makes me fleet-footed,
running weightless through willowherb
and yellow-rattle, a glorious
wildness; because his sleek muscles
could carry him
to another eternity; because his eyes
hold the roll of fog over the downs,
and because he knows the taste of turf
underhoof, the scent of a mare
in his nostrils, and because when he charges
towards me in the gallery
the nubile women and Persian armies
beside him become tawdry
and because I’ve tried to lose myself
in the is-ness of things
and Whistlejacket is that is,
bursting into being, into
himself; it’s not because he’s a horse,
and it’s because horse is all he is.
By Rosamund Taylor
Fishermen at sea
I hold the lamp steady,
although I think the light
is making the world darker.
My hold matters less the more we tilt.
By Maria Schiza
Forever is a lie we use
Are we not the richer / Who have suffered the shadow?
I saw a funeral today. People stood, aimlessly outside the church—
a crowd gathered by the nearby pub’s door. They were smoking cigarettes
in the rain – women hugged their arms over breasts numb with cold.
Five hours later, they were still there – ties looser, cheeks ruddier.
I thought of you – how the pen became a stranger in your hand,
how your words refused to come. I carry you here (I touch my heart),
as deep as a geode carries its unknown heart. Forever is a lie we use
to dull each other with comfort, to get a good night’s sleep.
I walked round the churchyard, watched a breeze sift the petals
of two spoiled bouquets, their usefulness done,
cast upon the slabs.
By Jane Burn
“Are we not the richer / Who have suffered the shadow?” From the poem, ‘Are We Not the Richer?’, by Mervyn Peake, 1946
Rosamund Taylor’s passionate engagement with visual art creates a remarkable sequence of poems. The originality and lyricism of her response brings the artists and models to new and often surprising life. Questioning, witty, empathic and tender, these poems gleam in their beauty and depth. – Jane Clarke
Rosamund Taylor’s poems display the two necessary features of ekphrastic poetry: an eye sensitive enough to truly see the image, and ear sensitive enough to translate what she sees into verbal music. Her work is founded in deep sympathy with the artist, and empathy for what the artist depicts. Her language has beautiful pictorial qualities, but is also eerily attuned to what is most often overlooked. These are poems which take seriously the challenges of looking and of making present. – Padraig Regan, author of Some Integrity, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for a Best First Collection and winner of the Clarissa Luard Award
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