Those Of You...

who follow me on Facebook will know that I've been writing a lot of poetry, recently.  And that I've been experimenting for a series called 'Linescapes'.  Here, though, the two meet.

The poem was written specifically for the piece, an accordian book made from transfer dyed Lutradur XL.  The front and back both represent Highland landscapes in Spring and Autumn, respectively (you are looking at autumn).  I stitched the yarn onto it to suggest the mountains...and then got stuck in an almighty fashion, for about three weeks.  I couldn't decide what to do next.  Then came the poem.

Rewriting The Landscape.

It might be somewhere, it might be nowhere,
A marriage of memory and imagination
A composite landscape, distilled
Like finest malt, from the high places, the colour
and the light.  A moment in spring,
Another in autumn.  A rush of names;
Strathpeffer.  Skye.  Lochinver.  Oban. Nairn.
Strathcarron.  Plockton.  Dornoch.  Cromarty.
Captured in colour, held in cloth, a fragment,
An amalgam,  aide memoire.  As if
I needed one; as if I could forget
The majesty of it, the grandeur of the high lands.
I lived there once; it lives within me still.
Unforgettable, burned into the bone.

I considered collageing the words onto the book, but it seemed fiddly to do, and not really suitable for a small book...so I wrote them on in a toning pen.  My husband grumbles that he can't read my writing...but I figure it's fairly straightforward to decipher.  I plan to do more work like this, combining the two disciplines; it seems somehow fitting.