Poetry is often inspired by art, and poems inspire art in turn. This series of posts celebrates this special connection in the words of artists and poets who have been published by Two Rivers Press.
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When the call for poems was made by Two Rivers Press for their 2017 publication, Stanley Spencer Poems: An Anthology, edited by Jane Draycott, Carolyn Leder and Peter Robinson, my first stop was The Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham where I spent a wonderful day with Spencer’s work, making copious notes and letting the pictures imprint themselves on me.
What I particularly love about the craft of poetry is the emotional connections the imagination can make between the visual, the heard and individual memories, and when, during my research, I came across Spencer’s ‘Gardening, 1945’, which features a man and a girl, heads down, backs bent, digging up leeks, there was something about the texture of their hats, clothes and the basket the girl is holding that brought to mind Tate Modern’s 2010 installation of Ai Weiwei’s 100 million individually crafted and painted porcelain seeds. And this, in turn, instead of the actual specialists who worked in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, took me to a roomful of angels painting the seeds.
My imagined angels were all-knowing, all-seeing, but unable to do anything to influence or change us – they were about the pure act of giving. And so, when my daughter, who had been my son, was transitioning*, I wanted for her the chance to choose her own identity and destiny without censure or judgement, and so I wrote this poem, addressed to her, about angels painting the porcelain seeds Spencer’s painting had reminded me of, and of my daughter’s right to fashion herself as many identities and destinies as she wishes, by running her fingers through the seeds, making billions of shifting pictures, all uniquely hers.
Claire Dyer, March 2022
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Of Angels, Porcelain and Paint
Imagine a room, square windows
letting in the light. Imagine the light
is bright and yellow and falling
across rows of tables in slabs
the colour of butter. At the tables angels
are painting porcelain sunflower seeds –
the husks of sunflower seeds that is –
and, in the falling yellow light,
focus on a pigment each: pink, green,
russet, caramel, grey.
They take breaks at regular intervals,
stretch their necks and talk about the news –
somewhere a war is ending,
another about to start;
how can they survive all this?
And, on one particular, peculiar,
sun-drenched day Stanley comes,
and they give him their creations,
give him baskets brimming
with painted seeds for his collage
of two figures (daughter
and father) harvesting leeks.
He bends Kathleen to her task.
She can smell soap,
her father’s gardener’s skin
is surprisingly clean and,
if you listen carefully
you can hear a torrent of birdsong;
clouds are holding in the rain.
Imagine then you are walking
into the room with the square windows
and the light that’s bright and yellow
and falling, and Stanley says,
You can stir your fingers through the seeds
if you like, make billions of shifting pictures,
all uniquely yours.
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From Yield, Two Rivers Press, 2021
A version of this poem appears in Stanley Spencer Poems: An Anthology, eds Jane Draycott, Carolyn Leder, Peter Robinson, Two Rivers Press, 2017
*I have my daughter’s permission to refer to her by her old name, status and gender where appropriate.
