Open Book: Poetry & images, Claire Beynon (Steele Roberts, 2007), 64pp, RRP $49.99
Laurice Gilbert
I've held this book awaiting review for an unconscionable time. My excuse is that I was waiting to get over the excitement of viewing it for the first time, so I could take a more measured approach to it. It didn't happen.
South African born, Dunedin artist and poet Claire Beynon has a BA Fine Arts with Distinction from the University of Natal, and completed postgraduate print-making in London. She works full-time as an artist, and recently held her latest exhibition, Fathom, in Christchurch. As a writer she's had work published widely, and she won the 2002 NZPS International Poetry Competition, Open Section, with ‘Mystery Sonatas', included in this collection.
The book starts as it means to go on: the cover illustration is one of Beynon's own (charcoal and pastel), and the layout of the Contents page looks almost like a poem itself. This a highly visual book, in every imaginable way. Many of these richly sensory poems are accompanied by an (untitled) illustration. They are loosely arranged in alphabetical order, though the letter represented is as likely to be in one of the later words of the title as in the initial one, eg ‘Getting to know you, Venice', for "V", ‘Roxanne', for "X". The alphabet itself is illustrated in "light calligraphy" - photographs of the moon from different parts of the world, exposed and stretched to shape each letter.
As you might expect from a collection of poems ordered in this way, there are unusual juxtapositions, with connections sometimes appearing only after several readings. ‘Sandwich Queen' ("Q"), for example, is an admiring portrait of an anonymous food worker, described by her looks and her actions:
. . . Her hair is up
twisted and twined, held hostage
by six seven eight nine ten clips and slides
and pins . . .
. . .
. . . Man she's skilled. She folds
sandwiches into origami. Lettuce never strays . . .
On the page opposite is a found poem, a thoughtful questioning of "Sam Bowser, cell biologist and veteran polar scientist", from a letter written to him:
Imagine the ripples through the science community
when you say you've discovered the world's oldest
one-celled creatures designing wallpaper for the heck of it
in your petri dish in Albany, New York?
(Quandary)
The two poems - visually descriptive vs intellectually enquiring - might seem to be strange bedfellows, but their closeness allows echoes and interplay between the determined proficiency of daily work and the imaginary life of single-celled creatures found by a scientist, equally devoted to the execution of his profession. On the page following ‘Quandary' is an egg shape, illustration rather than poem (though it could be either), made up entirely of the interaction of the letters A, C, G and T, the bases that perform the essential duty of building DNA. Exciting stuff.
Everyone who spends time in Antarctica (as Beynon did in 2005), seems to develop a fascination with the wind ("Antarctica & her rebel wind"), and Beynon's masterful use of metaphor (and washes, in the accompanying image) comes to the fore in ‘Katabatikos':
. . . She hears him
long before he comes
without warning
his hands trace her upper valleys
her mountains and hanging glaciers
travel her frozen
coastline. . .
And yet she is equally at home with word play for its own sake:
Something New
I have a newfound taste for lightness
albumen moon
mood stone
tone poem
I have a new lightness of taste
late wind
white ground
round sound
Many of the poems are shaped like their illustration (or vice versa):
Step
out
onto
white
not
as
a
body
bearing
any
weight
. . .
(Thin Ice)
is accompanied by a drawing of an upright feather, while ‘Getting to Know You, Venice' is shaped as an urn. While the effect of this might seem to be to distract the reader from the text, the poems could easily stand alone and there are recurring themes that hold the collection together: Antarctica, family, music, loss. Detail representative of the big picture is evident in ‘Mopani Worms', a tribute to the poet's African childhood:
Smooth as glass and cold as yoghurt
to the touch, they are dressed today in the colours
of Grandmother's leftover knitting. Ribs and rows
of orange, yellow, black and white
. . .
. . . I shift the grass and dust
of Africa between my toes. The sweat
on my lip is ripe mango.
There are a few poems that are less successful: ‘Out for Dinner' describes one of those occasions when you really had to be there, and ‘Close Call' doesn't achieve the emotional impact that the event imprinted on the poet's memory.
Overall, the book is intended to be an art object in the "tradition of the Artist's Book". My (admittedly limited) understanding of that "tradition" is that it's: 1) usually handmade, rather than printed, and 2) still in contention as to whether it's an art rather than a craft. It's a minor quibble, and Open Book is neither an illustrated poetry collection nor a set of illustrations accompanied by poems. Rather, it's synergistic, with poems as art, art as text, and the final effect being a rich sensory experience of a life well-observed. If by some miracle you haven't spent your Christmas money yet, this would do very nicely.
