on Lily Petch

Discovering captivating early poems scattered throughout painter Celia Paul’s memoir Self-Portrait (Cape, 2019) has set me to thinking about artists who also write poems. This is nothing new: from centuries ago Michelangelo’s Sonnets easily comes to mind, in several translations, including that by Elizabeth Jennings (Carcanet, 2003). Some Poems by Paul Klee was nicely put into English by Anselm Hollo (Scorpion, 1962). Picasso too, who liked to put his hand to most everything. And doubtless, Celia Paul does not see herself as a poet on an equal footing as an artist, but some certainly do, David Jones, Blake, equally or even more so. Three whose work I have become most recently acquainted with are Monica Ferrando: her painting and philosophy essay, with Giorgio Agamben, translated from Italian, The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore (Seagull, 2014), is her only book in English, though Barry Schwabsky has translated a suite of her poems, with drawings, in Snow lit rev; Lu Rose Cunningham, a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, who, amongst other, innovative work, makes wonderfully complex and thoughtful drawings – drawing is not a lost art for her (Cunningham’s Broken Sleep poetry book Interval: House, Lover, Slippages is reviewed in PNR 270); and now Lily Petch, just graduated from the Slade with a material oriented installation for her degree show.

Dunlin Press, in Wivenhoe, is a publisher very much in favour of interactions between literature and art. In fact, Lily Petch’s poetry debut From Stone to Clay to Butter is text only, but is to a large extent drawn ...