Book 2.0 - Current Issue

This is a discussion of how a poet, largely unskilled and untrained in videography, immersed himself in the process of make video poems and how he understands their function as reading performances. For those interested, samples of his work are available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxSJdULph-jtcE__WGQqbu5kJ-J93EtR6. Accessed 15 November 2024.

Poet and scholar Terry Gifford looks back on his life as a teacher – firstly in English secondary schools and then in higher education – and on his work as a critic, an ecocritic, a scholar of pastoral and post-pastoral literature, and as a poet who has written nine collections of poetry. He also reflects on his work as a leading authority on the poetry of Ted Hughes, and on his collaborations with fellow Hughes scholar Neil Roberts. This article ends with a selection of Gifford’s poetry from his eighth collection, A Feast of Fools (2018) and his ninth collection, unpublished at the time of writing. This article is based on a recorded conversation with Mick Gowar.

E koekoe te tūī, e ketekete te kākā, e kūkū te kererū.

(The tūī chatters, the kākā cackles, the kererū coos.)

The appeal of printed matter extends beyond the visual to include the ability to convey voice and emotion. Much like ‘vocal inflexion’ in spoken language, type and typography imbue content with a unique tone or ‘voice’. Using the above Māori whakataukī (‘proverb’) as a metaphor to investigate typographic voice, we devised a new twelve-week course which invites students to create a multi-sectional publication responding to endemic birds. Birds are symbolic creatures in Māori mythology and hold a special place in te ao Māori (world-view). As tauiwi kaiako (‘non-Māori teachers’) entrusted with the responsibility to design resources that honour an Indigenous partnership under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the whakataukī acts as a catalyst to develop an inclusive curriculum. The syllabus for this introductory article is pedagogically structured to scaffold students’ learning. Built as a sequence of analogue and digital exercises, students are encouraged to explore distinct compositional strategies relevant to six diverse types of content: (1) creating dynamic text forms to reflect poetry, (2) generating typographic patterns with letterforms to represent birdsong, (3) integrating letterforms with images to create expressive descriptions, (4) using hierarchy to establish structure within long-form text, (5) using expressive text to depict symbolism and significance in culture and (6) composing fluid lines of text to express rhythm within a song. The resulting multi-sectional publications also reflect the whakataukī by bringing together distinctive print and typographic formats into a cohesive publication – a collective ‘chorus’ of different typographic voices. This article unpacks examples of student work to elucidate learning and successes, highlighting practical challenges of teaching diverse students and introducing them to a conceptual framework for a communication design project through the metaphor of ‘voice’.

This article describes ongoing research that is investigating ways in which poetic writing can be developed into a resource to support the well-being of people living with dementia and their carers. The Companion Poems audiobook project involves the co-creation of sensory poetry books for people living with dementia. The project brings together the team’s expertise in poetic writing, design for dementia and interactive digital technology to create tactile audio poetry books. The rationale for the work, the research methodology and the creative methods used are described through an account of one Companion Poem: ‘How the Garden Grows’ and its development into a bespoke sensory audiobook.

This project focuses poetry and the creative practice of making and performance to express a visual dialogue in which rhythm and repetition express an imagined, sensory experiential journey. ‘The vernacular of the diaspora’ is in the form of distinct creative cultural expressions which can shift how poetry is conveyed and experienced to an audience that is being increasingly exposed to new hybrid forms of different cultural traditions. It elaborates through an example. It reveals how members of a diaspora experience places they inhabit to return to the place of their ancestors through these different creative expressions. The visual images in this project show the artist as a member of the Tamil diaspora walking in slow rhythmical progression, traversing diverse terrains in different countries, the bare feet sensing the ground. The artist wears the flowing drape of the sari that holds traces of a community’s footprints that once gathered to give acknowledgement of loss in the many decades of war through making. The artist, in the role of a migrant, is thus taking the broader community with her on the journey. The lines of poetry in English and Tamil express the journey through senses, and the images are arranged to take on the visual form of the ritual drawing of Kolam – a geometrical line drawing composed of straight lines, curves and loops, drawn around a grid pattern of dots – which is practised by Tamil women.

This article examines the production, concept and realization of the author’s recent artist book The Smooth and the Striated (2022) which documents the process of listening whilst in the field. Intertwining affective realizations with fragments of the theoretical discourse on the listening subject and landscape, the work was produced in response to a single day of fieldwork undertaken at the Monument to the Battle for the Wounded, a post-Second World War monument in central Bosnia and Herzegovina which was partially destroyed following the Bosnian War of 1992–95. The fieldwork, consisting of audio field recording, photography and writing, took place as part of the artist’s wider project to investigate the problematics of the former Yugoslavia through its memorial heritage, but to do so by means of a speculative methodology that imagines sound as an infinitely fine but persistent presence. The artist book was completed as part of a residency at Footnote Centre for Image and Text in Belgrade, Serbia, and printed in collaboration with the DIY/not-for-profit printing house Praksa Kvaka in Belgrade. The publication’s title references Deleuze and Guattari’s typology of space in which geographies are characterized as overlaid with the imprints of power and/or resistance. This reference is echoed in the photographic reproductions of patina and the erosion of concrete forms throughout the book, together with the physical object of the work – the dense, black risograph printing process leaves a residue of its disintegration on the hands of the reader and as such the reader cannot help but be inculcated in the book’s physical presence, as well as an attempt at countering the monument’s verticality by being bound horizontally.

Review of: One Soul We Divided: A Critical Edition of the Diary of Michael Field, Carolyn Dever (ed.) (2024)

Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 360 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-69120-811-4, h/bk, $99.95/£84.00

ISBN 978-0-69120-800-8, p/bk, $29.95/£25.00

ISBN 978-0-69125-590-3, e-book, $29.95/£25.00