On the Eve of May Day

Like the Hollywood actors of old who concealed their dates of births so as to seem forever youthful, I have a bit of a blank spot when it comes to remembering dates. I’m just not good with putting the significant incidents of my life in chronological order, which is why I get evasive whenever required to provide a conventional biography. In fact the sole thing that can place me in the general vicinity of something for which I’m attempting to recall the date, is by thinking about which dog I had at that time. I keep a ‘significant dates’ book for birthdays and anniversaries, though alas almost invariably forget to look at it. I certainly don’t hold the departure dates of loved ones in my head, save with the one exception: May Day 2005.

My friend Catriona Urquhart was a shy writer. She wrote obsessively all her life, mostly poetry, but it was a private passion that she rarely shared. Because Catriona was such an extraordinarily good story-teller in conversation, when she one day asked Peter what he’d like for his forthcoming birthday gift, he replied he’d like a short story, which was a cunning ploy because though she looked a tad uneasy at having been caught in a trap of her own making, she knew she’d have to deliver. Peter wasn’t about to let things rest until she had, and in the lead up to his birthday he regularly reminded her of her promise. On the night when Catriona and Ian arrived for dinner, as I took their coats she requested writing-paper, a glass of wine and the use of an upstairs room to work in. She hadn’t begun the promised story, but said she’d have it down in half and hour. And she did just that, reappearing with a slim sheaf of sheets which on later examination we found to be neat and perfect, written smoothly with no hesitations or corrections. She was persuaded to read Palmyra Jones to the assembled guests that evening, and although she feigned a becoming nervousness, she read it as well as anyone ever will, in her soft Glaswegian brogue, and all present were mesmerised by it.

So much so that Nicolas and Frances McDowall of Old Stile Press, present that evening, asked her permission for them to publish it in a small inkjet edition, which they did, and I made the illustrations for it. This was in 1997, and it was the first book I made with Nicolas, marking the beginning of a long collaboration with OSP. 

Catriona would never put herself forward. When first I knew her she was working as a librarian in Caerleon. She wrote secretly, and it wasn’t until much later that she let slip that she’d once studied poetry under Seamus Heaney, who had been sufficiently impressed to tell her to stay in touch with him, though she never did. Whatever came over her to make the suggestion she’d write a poetic text to accompany my 2001 exhibition The Mare’s Tale, I’ll never know. It was completely out of character, perhaps fuelled by her love for my late father Trevor, and the fact that the heart of the exhibition was to be his story, about which she felt fully qualified to write because in his last years he’d opened so readily to her with his accounts of past times. Catriona stored up stories as her treasures. She was a ‘curator’ of stories, and of lives, and truthfully by the time Trevor died, she’d had more stories from him than he’d ever shared with us. She was a wonderfully appreciative audience for him, which of course his children could never be.

The original intention had been to print Catriona’s poems on information boards in the gallery, but Nicolas McDowall discovered them on A4 sheets scattered on our kitchen table when he visited, and for the second time was impressed enough to seek Catriona’s permission to print her work in a slender but beautifully produced edition.

Once again I was asked to illustrate, and again had to produce the drawings in a weekend rush in order to meet the printing deadline for the book to be available in time for the exhibition opening.

Catriona was working on a new translation of the Ramuz libretto for Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, a project we’d planned together for Old Stile Press, when she died of cancer on May Day 2005. Peter and I were in the process of re-locating from Cardiff to Aberystwyth where he’d taken up the post of head of the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historical Monuments Wales. Right at the point when we were making a significant change in our lives, I lost the person who had most anchored me at a dark time of my life before Peter.

I thought I would never get over grieving for her. Every day in the months after her death felt like a climb out of deep well. A year into Peter’s posting, we found Ty Isaf, purchased it and moved in. Almost the first thing we planted was a stick-in-a-pot that Catriona had given me, assuring it would one day grow into a walnut tree. This didn’t seem likely because when removed from the pot, it was discovered the little tap-root had rotted clean away. Yet thrive it did, as she’d promised, and here it is today, close on thirty feet high and coming into leaf on the eve of May Day, which anniversary tomorrow will mark the fact that Catriona left us, aged just fifty-two, nineteen years ago.

Peter delivered the eulogy at her funeral. Titled Golden Catriona, you can read it if you scroll down on the page you’ll find here. And if interested, you can read a more detailed account of her speed-writing Palmyra Jones, here.

Though I illustrated the sixteenth century poet Richard Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd for Old Stile Press, Catriona was the first living poet with whom I collaborated. Had we been able to look into the future at where my career would carry me in terms of working with poetry after The Mare’s Tale, we both would have been dumfounded. After Catriona had gone I didn’t expect there to be another poet in my life. But then quite suddenly Marly Youmans in the US drifted into my world, and our friendship was instantaneous, deep, and I think unexpected for both of us. (We work together still.) With Marly the list grew: Damian Walford Davies and Callum James in the UK, and Andrea Selch, Dave Bonta and Jeffery Beam in the US, all wrote poems about my work.

Simon Armitage invited me to Faber & Faber to illustrate the 2018 revision of his extraordinarily successful translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and in 2019 his reinvention of a fairytale, Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes had only just been published by Design for Today with illustrations by me, when he was announced as Poet Laureate. There’s been a recent cover for Vintage’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and a new cover for Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Last year Folio Society published a sumptuous edition of Beowulf in the translation by Catriona’s tutor, Seamus Heaney, illustrated by me. This year I’m illustrating a Folio Society double-volume set of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey in translations by Emily Wilson.

Catriona began this trajectory for me. Poets are my tribe, and I began to learn the art of making images to accompany words, with her. In my head I still share my projects with Catriona, talking things over with her and trying out ideas. Still we communicate, in the strange way that the living do with the dead when imagining the conversations that might have been were they still with us. Gifts she gave us are all around, in daily use. The narrow-loom Welsh blanket that’s getting so threadbare it’ll soon be more darn than weave, and the beautiful faience plate she’d thought to be English Delft but turned out to be Dutch. There’s the French slipware jug I’d spotted in a closed antique shop in Montrose that she and Ian went back and purchased for me as a surprise gift. I painted it in 2001, titling it ‘Catriona’s Jug’. In the background the tower of Tretower Castle, where I’d worked as a relief custodian in the interim years between the theatre and painting, where books of poetry were my companions in the long winter months of few visitors. There are the pieces of furniture Catriona and Ian brought to us, and on our shelves the countless books. I still smile when I look at the huge Nick Evans painting of a Welsh sin-eater offered at auction, which I badly wanted but had been unable to persuade Peter we should have because he wanted a Nick Evans mining painting. Without a word Catriona purchased it and then came to us with the bill, airily declaring she knew we’d love it and so just went ahead and bid on our behalf. No outraged glare from Peter could dampen her gleefulness over outwitting him, and her sideways glances warned me off admitting my part in the conspiracy when she was having so much fun. It was our secret until she died, at which point I confessed. I think he’s forgiven us!

My dear, dear friend, I miss you still. Every day.

Above: Catriona’s Jug

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Celebrating Cranogwen

To mark St. David’s Day (March 1st), a new design has been produced in collaboration with Sussex Lustreware to commemorate the Welsh poet, teacher and mariner, Sarah Jane Rees. (1839 -1916.)

 
As a teenager Sarah Jane declined the dressmaker’s apprenticeship suggested to her by her family, and instead spent two years crewing on her sea-captain father’s ketch before returning to study for her master mariner’s certificate in navigation in London.

Despite being fully-qualified there was the expected opposition to her captaining any ship, so instead she returned to Wales where she became a teacher, educating children and tutoring young men in the arts of navigation.

A celebrated poet in the Welsh language, Sarah Jane was also known by her Bardic name of Cranogwen, and those who she helped gain their master mariner certificates were known affectionately as ‘Cranogwen’s Captains’.

Studio photographs of the adult Sarah Jane show her long hair centre-parted and worn tightly arranged against the head, with the jewellery, gleaming gowns and velvet jackets of a woman of her class.

What she wore when she crewed her fathers ship is not known, and so my portrait of her is a fanciful one in the tradition of the romantically inclined depictions of sailors on nineteenth century ceramics and toy theatre character sheets.

I’ve given her the varnished and be-ribboned straw-boater of a nineteenth century sailor, with a neckerchief knotted at the collar of a shirt worn under an open jacket.

Sarah Jane Rees must have been a woman of courageous and independent spirit to have taken the path she chose. She was a lecturer in an age when public speaking by women was frowned upon, she established a women’s magazine and founded the South Wales Women’s Temperance Union in order to secure the safety of women in both their homes and within society. 

Sarah didn’t marry, and there is clear evidence that her lasting relationships were with two women: Fanny Rees, who died young from tuberculosis, and Jane Thomas, the lifelong companion addressed by Sarah in her most celebrated poem, My Friend: 

“I love you, my beloved Venus”. 

Below: The maritime tradition of Sunderland Lustreware

Inside the collar of our jug runs the text: Sarah Jane Rees, also known as Cranogwen: Morwr (Mariner) Bard (Poet) Athrawes (Teacher)

Beowulf for Folio Society

Letter sent to the Beowulf team at Folio Society, 14/11/23.

“Today the most enormous box arrived from Folio Society. Packed immaculately, it took me a while to work my way to the contents and unwrap the top copy of the three books within. I’m not sure I have the words to express what I feel, but I’ll do my best. 

The edition is staggering, unarguably the most magnificent and significant creation of my career as an illustrator. My hands shook as I went through it page by page. The book design and text layouts, airily perfect. The translation from pen and ink artworks into illustrations, nothing short of a miracle. I worked on the drawings for many months, so I know what they look like in every detail because my nose was practically glued to them as I tapped away into the small hours rendering all that pointillism. But even though they’re all but tattooed on the insides of my eyelids, seeing them afresh and reinvented by the inversions and additions of colour, I’m knocked sideways. (The printing of the images is perfect in every way.) I’m so happy that the book is steeped in all the right traditions, and yet feels boldly contemporary. The binding and box are wonderful beyond all my imaginings and anticipation. Sumptuous in every way, the sensations of opening and turning the pages of the edition become visceral. Everything under the fingertips silky to the touch. The scents of the book, the leather, paper, glue and ink, all immersive and thrilling.

Sunday marked my seventy-second birthday, and Beowulf has been the best present. Not all book outcomes can be happy. I’ve made books in the past for which my hopes were high but things were not, in the end, done well. However all disappointments crumble before this edition of a text I love. Seriously, I could die happy knowing I’d made this one book.

My warmest good wishes to you all,

Clive Hicks-Jenkins”

Click here for a video review of the book.

Above: promotional animated video for Beowulf produced by David W. Slack

I had no idea just how lavish the book was to be when I first began work on it. It was only stage by stage that it began to dawn on me that the binding and clamshell box, built at the bookbinders Smith Settle in Leeds, were going to be works of art in their own right. I made all the illustrations at the size they were to be printed, so from the start I was aware that the edition was going to be on a handsome scale.

Above: Pen and ink illustrations in progress on my desk

Reviews from the Folio Society Website

Heroic volume for a heroic tale! I could smell the vellum the moment I opened the beautiful cloth-covered box. Wonderful. The book’s cover and the marvellous illustrations are reminiscent of Sutton Hoo without being exact copies. The thick, high quality paper is a joy to handle. The new Introduction is interesting. This is a volume to treasure. Really not too pricey considering its very high quality, the greatness of the tale and the beauty of the Heaney translation.

Review by Mr James Barry on 03/01/24 *****

Simply a stunning classic which I will hold for a lifetime and pass on to be enjoyed. The design and illustrations take you into the mythology with a powerful effect.

Review by a customer on 18/07/23 *****

A stunning book I can’t fault in any way.

Review by Steve Shaw-Wright on 21/07/23 *****

Extra large format book expertly produced with high quality components and materials. Not a single defect in craftsmanship. Oh, and my favourite translation by the way!

Review by Francis LaMorte, MD on 09/08/23 *****

Dark Tales

In 2019 Olivia Ahmad wrote about Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ explorations of Hansel & Gretel for Varoom magazine.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ retellings of classic fairy tale Hansel & Gretel have an edge. Taking in the original tale’s horrific neglect, abuse and murder, Clive has adapted the story into a picture book, toy theatre and original stage production. Olivia Ahmad looks at Clive’s startling manifestations of the familiar story.

“The boy was called Hansel, the girl was called Gretel – hence the title, Hansel & Gretel.” So the narrator opened Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ 2018 staging of his version of the European folk tale, first recorded by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. The performance had the subtitle a nightmare in eight scenes, which undermined any notion that Clive’s combination of animation and puppetry would be a saccharine adaptation of the story of the witch who tempts two lost children into her house made of gingerbread. “It’s a dark and brutal story”, he says, “the mother has been cruel and treacherous, and is dead by the time the children return home, with no explanation of what happened to her. Gretel has killed the witch in the most dreadful manner, which is not just something you can brush aside. There will be psychological scars. So the story is odd and downright nasty and has too often been glossed in endless re-tellings. It was just too good a chance to miss.”

Clive first took up the chance to envision the story for a book in 2012, inspired by a childhood memory. “I had a Toby Twirl annual,” he explains. “There was a story of a witch who captured Toby and imprisoned him. The pictures of her terrified and enthralled me. She stuck like a burr in my imagination and she’s been there ever since. When in an idle moment some years ago I felt the need to be drawing a witch, I chose Hansel & Gretel as the vehicle simply because a witch was central to the plot. I painted the characters onto a set of enamelware plates for a bit of fun, for no other purpose than for use at home. And in so doing, I laid the foundations for the larger project, though I didn’t know it at the time.”

The plate designs, produced with hand-cut stencils reminiscent of European folk art, migrated from Clive’s kitchen shelves in 2014 when he adapted them into a series of illustrations for Random Spectacular magazine. After a passing comment at social media that he would like to expand the magazine piece into a picture book, Random Spectacular agreed to publish one. Clive envisioned a dark tale, one that asked difficult questions: “What happens to children who kill? What effect will it have on them?”

The character design of the siblings was vital to telling their story: “The children that I designed right at the start were really simple. There was a touch of St Trinian’s to them: short and pod-like with skinny arms and legs and dressed in school uniforms. Though caricatured there was a tenderness and bewilderment to them that was touching. Hansel is incredibly passive throughout, a poor lost puppy. Gretel appears meek, though later manifests an awesome inner Ninja.”

Alongside the cast of characters appear occasional motifs drawn from European toys and popular design ephemera that Clive has gathered over the years. “It’s not exactly a collection”, he explains, “but a loose gathering of objects that interest, intrigue and move me. Some inherited and some sought. I find that vintage toys worm their ways into my imagination and from there into my work.” While these elements represented a personal history, moments like Hansel and Gretel making their getaway with the aid of a duck based on a 1950s Fisher Price pull-toy, make Clive’s fantasy world uncannily familiar.

For the rendering of the book Clive made separations, a technique previously unfamiliar to him. Creating a drawing for each coloured layer of an illustration, the layers of drawings were then scanned and coloured digitally according to Pantone references he selected to create a sugared almond palette.

The Random Spectacular picture book was published in 2016, and the same year Clive was commissioned for another Hansel & Gretel project by Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden, which sells historic and contemporary cut-out-and-assemble toy theatres. The commission to create the Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre resonated with Clive’s childhood: “As a boy I’d cut out, coloured in and performed Pollock’s productions on a home-made stage constructed from a cornflakes packet, and so this was a dream come true for me.”

He initially suggested an adaptation of his Hansel & Gretel picture book, and while the Pollock’s project went on to incorporate some of the atmosphere of it, many of the more grotesque elements were considered “way too scary” for the toy theatre’s intended family audience. So Clive embarked on yet another adaptation of the story, re-fashioning it to create a meta- production in miniature, perhaps informed by his early career as a performer: The Pollock’s Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre starts from the point where the picture book finishes. “Having survived the ordeal of the witch, the children leave home to make their way in the world. Arriving in the big city they’re picked up by a theatre impresario who promises fame and fortune if they sign a contact with him, and they duly end up starring in a pantomime version of their own story, though with most of the unpalatable bits edited out.

So no wicked mother ending up being murdered by their father, and a much tamer version of a witch who doesn’t have tentacles where her nose should be!” The performance takes place at the fictional ‘Theatre Royal, Jury Lane’, a play on word of London’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.

The Benjamin Pollock’s Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre was published in 2017, and while light-hearted in tone, it retained some of the gothic horror of the picture book with its poisonous candy blues and pinks overlaid with a blanket of dark pencil hatching. The flatpack consists of a stage, proscenium arch, scenes, characters and props, along with a script and a poster to ‘advertise’ the production.

The following year, Clive’s Hansel & Gretel: a nightmare in eight scenes premiered on a life-size stage at the Cheltenham Music Festival. It subsequently toured the UK, finishing at the Barbican in London where a performance was recorded for broadcast Christmas week 2018 on BBC Radio 3.

For this his largest imagining of the story – a combination of live narration, music, animation and tabletop and shadow-screen puppetry – Clive collaborated with producer Kate Romano and the Goldfield Ensemble. The producer had originally visited Clive to discuss another project, but after seeing his Pollock’s designs suggested they make a music theatre production about the ill-fated brother and sister.

Clive recommended the producer enlist the poet Simon Armitage to write the libretto. Simon took the story in a completely different direction by placing the children into a contemporary context. “I think it was genius on Simon’s part to set the story in a conflict zone, and to rewrite the adults as loving parents fearful that their children might become casualties of war,” Clive says. “That changed everything for me in terms of how we relate to the family. They’re not dysfunctional, but find themselves in terrible circumstances.” The performance opened with animations of marching toy soldiers, which soon fall into the disarray of battle. Hansel and Gretel’s parents send their children away from this carnage in order to protect them.

However without their parents’ protection, they become enticed and ensnared by a witch. When she prepares to bathe them so they can be trafficked, Gretel fears that the hot water for the bath will be used for boiling them alive. “Everything that we see and hear is filtered through the overheated imaginations of the children who are full of fears and misunderstandings,” Clive explains.

“Everything in the production, from the predatory witch and her grubby icing-sugared cottage, to the layout of its bleak interior conjured from a doll’s house, is how they see things.”

Hansel and Gretel were puppets designed by Clive and made by Jan Zalud. “I needed the puppets to function at a different level to their picture book counterparts, and be fully up to the emotional requirements of Simon Armitage’s text, ” Clive says, and his designs evolved from research on the experiences of children in transit camps. This approach was not welcomed by the Goldfield ‘project team’, who reported his drawings made them think of children in concentration camps. “I stuck to my guns,” he remembers, “because I knew the direction was the right one.”

Only one Hansel and one Gretel puppet appeared in the production, so the design and execution created appropriately neutral expressions for the puppet’s faces onto which many thoughts could be projected by audiences. Because the streaming would see them much magnified on the screen, they’d need an innate grace of movement so the moments of tenderness and vulnerability would withstand close scrutiny.

Several collaborators were assembled and directed by Clive to realise the project. The composer Matt Kaner had come to it through Kate Romano. Clive invited Peter Lloyd to produce shadow puppets of the children’s parents and the witch, Pete Telfer, to film the animations to be projected onto the stage, and his regular collaborator and assistant Phil Cooper, to be in charge of the model sets and painted backgrounds for the puppets. Puppeteer Di Ford came to the project at Clive’s invitation having previously worked with him on the stage production of The Mare’s Tale, and after a puppeteer audition and workshop, Lizzie Wort joined the company. Costumier Oonagh Creighton Griffiths was brought in to dress the puppets.

As director of such a broad team, how did Clive retain his vision of the piece? His earlier career was in stage direction and choreography, and so he knows his choice of collaborators is vital. “I mostly work with people I know well and feel at ease with,” he says, “the team are my professional family. When we’re all pulling together there’s not really a hierarchy. Once briefed I trust them. Sometimes they bring me what I expect, and occasionally there are surprises. There need to be the possibilities that some elements may exceed my expectations or bring something entirely unanticipated.”

Clive’s own vintage toys played an important role onstage. One hundred year old German building blocks became the playthings of the children, and clockwork ‘pecking chickens’ stood in for the flock of birds that ate Hansel’s trail of breadcrumbs.

The chickens and a Russian clockwork ‘singing’ bird are also due to appear in Clive’s next iteration of the story: a richly illustrated edition of Simon Armitage’s libretto, produced by independent publisher Design for Today and due for release later this year.

“A toy,” Clive says, “can open your heart and make you remember what wonder feels like.” However his adoption of these tokens from the past is not an indulgence in nostalgia. “I’m not such a fool as to think that yesterday was better. I was there and it wasn’t! My explorations are all about objects being repositories of histories. They’re like radio dials, and if you twiddle them you ‘hear’ the past. That past can be anything, from sweet to despairing. It’s the focus that’s all important, and what the focus opens in the mind and heart.”

Olivia Ahmad, 2019.

Hansel & Gretel was published subsequent to this article and in 2020 won the V&A Illustrated Book Award. It’s still available from the publisher at THIS LINK. In October a new hardback edition is due out from Faber & Faber.

Above, the 2019 Design for Today edition of Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes, and below, the new edition forthcoming from Faber & Faber in October 2023.

A Plunge into the Mythic Wood: a review by Seth Wright of Seren of the Wildwood

 

This review appeared originally in Front Porch Republic.

Donemana, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.

The deeper I get into middle-age, and the more my time is swallowed up by the just demands of family and parish ministry, the more gruesome my crimes against literature become. Here is an egregious one: until recently, it had been far too long—probably years—since I’d read a narrative poem. But recently, I read Marly Youmans’ Seren of the Wildwood.

The poem came providentially, an unlooked-for eruption of goodness into my stacks of commentaries and sermon notes. Seren of the Wildwood is a thin place, a nexus between the waking world and that hazily surreal, maddeningly concrete, constantly shifting landscape of the dream world. Youmans’ gift for creating primordial archetypal images that stir the gut and fascinate the eye of the mind places her among the best of the poets. If you’re a connoisseur, even a lapsed or dilatory one, of narrative poetry, buy Seren of the Wildwood and read it today.

To begin with, the book, a stereotypical slim volume of poetry, is gorgeous. The work of illustrator Clive Hicks-Jenkins is fantastic—in the etymological and informal senses alike—in how he translates Youmans’ copious and varied imagination into a visual lexicon. The images interspersed through the text recall (inter alia) the doodles and illuminations of Irish monks, Greco-Roman sculptures, William Blake’s illustrations, and Van Gogh’s still-life paintings. Perfect harmony exists between text and image, even on the occasions when the image doesn’t obviously function as an illustration of some particular concept from the poem.

There is also a nice congruence between the poem and the page: each stanza fits perfectly onto a single 9” x 6” page. It’s almost as if Youmans planned her formalized stanza with the volume in mind. Most spreads have two stanzas; the rest include an image on one side plus a stanza and doodle on the other. The pages feel neither too empty nor too crowded—which is good, because by golly the poem itself is crowded, but I’ll get there later.

Above: drawings for the book’s illustrations underway, with a print-out of the poem as the artist’s guide.

Seren of the Wildwood begins not with a prologue, but with a prolegomenon. The difference is significant, for a prolegomenon is not merely informative, but schematic or methodical. It provides the interpretive key for what follows. My policy as a reviewer is to avoid spoilers at all costs, which (thankfully) in this case relieves me of the burden of explaining how to interpret Seren of the Wildwood­—my children often ask me about my dreams, and however powerfully I experienced them, I find it difficult to explicate their deeper meanings. Nevertheless, the prolegomenon is deeply significant both in its proleptic function (which provokes the reader’s sense of dread and hope for redemption) and in the way it raises questions that will not be answered for quite some time, if at all.

Above: drawings for the book’s illustrations underway.

Youmans tackles two big tasks in the prolegomenon. First, she introduces the primordially mystic wildwood, the wholly ambivalent landscape that dominates the poem. In Youmans’ words, “The wildwood is a tough / Terrain, yet beauty springs / Like diamonds from the rough.” The rhyme of tough/rough gropes towards the ferocity of the place; the image of the emergent diamonds testifies to the painful possibility of redemption. The prolegomenon also complicates any interpretation of the poem with its maddeningly suggestive title, “Prolegomenon, in the voice of Wren.” Who speaks “in the voice of Wren” – the poet, Wren herself, or some other entity? I reckon answering that question (even with the likely answer of “Who knows?”) is an obvious starting place for any sort of critical reading of Seren of the Wildwood.

The prolegomenon is identical in form to the other 61 stanzas: 21 lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter followed by a bob-and-wheel metrically similar to that used in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: a bob (one-foot line) rhymed into the wheel (four three-foot lines). That makes a total of 62 stanzas of 26 lines, and while my inner numerologist and medievalist are screaming about palindromic or chiastic significance, the still small voice of my inner editor exhorts me to move on. Perhaps some arcane consideration for mystic numbers impelled Youmans to end the poem where she did; I thought that it ended suddenly, and more like a motorway ending abruptly in the middle of a city than a trail coming out of a forest and halting on the edge of some precipice affording magnificent panoramic vistas of the illimitable ocean. A few more stanzas to round things off would, in my estimation, make the thing feel more like a conclusion than an ending.

That said, I suspect Youmans knew exactly what she was doing by ending Seren of the Wildwood as hastily as I felt she did. Although neatly assigning a genre to the poem may prove impossible—is it a fairy tale? a lay? a Greekish tragedy?—it certainly has strong affinities to medieval dream visions such as The Pearl or Confessio Amantis. But of course, deeply steeped in medieval poetry as Youmans is, she has recourse to a rich vein of sophisticated techniques for narrating the inner workings of the human soul. Seren of the Wildwood is nothing if not dreamlike—and not in a comforting way. The prolegomenon strikes a note of foreboding which swells perceptibly in the first stanza and dominates large portions of the poem. Reading the poem is like a feverish nightmare, in which some awful and awfully inarticulable sense of doom hangs over the reader as the scene shifts whimsically and characters flit momentarily across the periphery of vision while leaving a sharp impression, where everything seems startlingly new yet possessed of a familiarity that is simultaneously welcome and terrifying, where it feels like your feet are chained or weighted as you try to flee from whatever fell beast is pursuing you through the weirdest and most inhospitable terrain—and that terrain itself seems to be indistinguishable from all the nightmarish terror—when all of a sudden, striking through the disorientating web of dream, comes unexpectedly the blessed gift of waking to the birdsong of a bright morning of the incipient spring. Perhaps the sudden ending is Youmans’ mimesis of waking to the fragility of renewed hope.

A central component of Seren of the Wildwood’s mythical dreamworld is the ubiquity of primal archetypes. Rash words; woodside cottages; prophecies; unheeded warnings; god-kings; fertility religions; hermits; rites of purification by water; preternatural births; mountaintop gardens; dreams and visions—these are the threads with which Youmans weaves, and of which no lover of narrative poetry grows weary. What is particularly impressive about Youmans’ weaving is her ability to use such venerable archetypes freshly. Yes, I’ve met them all before, and given time I could tell you where. But meeting them in Seren of the Wildwood reminds me of the time a man I’d known for years shaved his moustache and became unrecognizable for a few shocking minutes. The effect was initially disruptive—for several seconds I knew I was failing to recognize a familiar face, a face I’d seen recently in different guise. Recognition came soon, but it was not particularly comforting to see the pale wide acreage of his upper lip. Something essential, I felt, had changed in the man’s appearance. The same with the landmarks and inhabitants of Youmans’ Wildwood; they seem hauntingly familiar yet disconcertingly strange. Her power simultaneously to defamiliarize and reenchant is enviable and deliciously enjoyable.

Even more so is Youmans’ willingness to venture into dark places—into the black heart of the Wildwood, no less—and return carrying a light. Terrible things happen to poor Seren, who becomes a sort of Job or Griselda (though without a YHWH and Satan or a Walter directing her testing in the background), yet she is neither bereft of friends nor devoid of healing. Youmans is neither sentimental nor nihilistic about suffering, but rather glimpses something of its obdurate inevitability and its redemptive capacities. The Wildwood is not just a dreamscape, it is a place where at some point in life every person wanders, torn and hungry, yearning for nothing more than to encounter the spreading horizon where the forest ends.

The poem is not perfect; only rarely does a poem of any length attain perfection, and I doubt a single poem anywhere near the length of Seren of the Wildwood avoids the odd misstep. Youmans’ vocabulary is rich and her syntax wonderfully fluid, but my feeling is that she sometimes goes too far in piling up synonyms. For example: “the shape was such / A wraith, phantasm, apparition” (pg. 42); “His fairy-story growth ferocious, fierce / Outlandish and preposterous […] It seemed satanic, manic, half insane” (pg. 45); “All the ground seemed jocund, jaunty, gladsome” (pg. 52). Such variation might delight some readers; it reminds me of P.G. Woodhouse dropping thesaurus entries into his prose for comedic effect, which rather blunts whatever edge Youmans hoped to wield. Also, a few phrases were unquestionably clunky. But Youmans’ shortcomings are few and relatively minor. After all, even Homer nods.

Distant are the days when writing excellent poems assured a poet of a place in the canon, or fame, or even public notice equivalent to the exploits of a D3 college football team. Such are our times—which is surely unfair on Youmans, who at the least deserves to be known as the creator of the Seren stanza. My first encounter with Seren of the Wildwood brought to mind dozens of my favourite poems, poems that over the millennia people have taken the trouble to read, copy, annotate, memorise, and perform. Seren of the Wildwood reminded me of them by way of family resemblance; the poem is at home among the poems that last. It is a good poem. A very good poem.

Here is what Seren of the Wildwood has done for me: it’s rekindled my love of narrative poetry. Once I have read several of my old favourites, I’ll read it again, and then I’ll move on to the rest of Youmans’ work. In the meantime, dear reader, put your order into Wiseblood Books and get to reading the instant your copy of Seren of the Wildwood arrives. If your literary tastes are vaguely similar to mine, you’ll enjoy it thoroughly.

Seth Wright 2023

Collaborating with David, part 2: Beowulf

Please Click on the title above to watch the videos embedded in this post.

Above: click to view the book trailer for Beowulf

Clive: David, you were undertaking trial digital work for me while I was working on the illustrations for Beowulf. I made them in black ink on white board, but had it in mind to see how they’d look when inverted to white on black. What you produced provided me with inverted images of drawings and digital colourings of them throughout all the earlier stages of the book’s creation. Although the final additions of colour were done at Folio Society, you did all the preliminary ‘tests’ that enabled me to make the decisions ready to brief the Folio team. 

Above: detail of illustration from the book after image inversion and digital colouring by Folio Society.

Below: original ink artwork on mountboard with pencil trim guide, before inversion and colouring.

David: Oh it was such a joy to have a private viewing of your Beowulf drawings, and because I was messing around with them digitally, I could easily produce many different versions. It was fascinating wasn’t it, that some worked instantly as inverted images, while others were more powerful as you’d drawn them?

Above: finished ink drawings piling up on the artist’s desk.

Clive: In the end we included some drawings as made and some inverted. The combination worked well.

David: I made some red versions which were just OK, but I remember layering a deep spot-lit blue-green with the image for the first time, and it pulsed and sang immediately.

Below: trial colour images of inversions made by David.

But I think you had committed to the blue at that point, and the intensely saturated blue-on-black and black-on-blue that their production manager achieved in print for your full-bleed double-page illustrations, is way beyond anything I’ve ever seen in print. I’ve done a lot of printmaking through the years, but how they achieved that glowing deepest blue is beyond me. It pulses with some sort of other life and is just unforgettable.  I know that you were blown away by the book when you saw it.

Clive: I couldn’t stop shaking when I received and opened my copy. I was anxious because I knew by this point the edition was printed, bound and boxed, and there could be no turning back. I’d seen many page proofs over the months, but between the last proof seen and the finished book the production manager had worked miracles. I was simply speechless when I saw the the quality of the printing.

Because of your contributions at preliminary stages, and because you knew the illustrations inside out, it was inevitable that at some point we’d start talking about the potential of the images to be animated into life, and that’s exactly what happened. 

David: Well of course, what a gift this was! Your drawings for Beowulf were in a paper-cut style, and so ready-made for shadow theatre puppetry. I’d learned to animate a while back when we’d made an animated film to promote the Design for Today Beauty and Beast Toy Theatre. With that experience under my belt, how difficult could it be to create a three or four second animation as a test run for a potential Beowulf book-trailer? I have to say that it was BLOODY difficult. I’m pretty sure that the learning curve was so steep that at more than one point my neuron’s firing registered on Google Earth. But anyway, this idea of a moment of animation er… well, it snowballed rather didn’t it? 

Above: articulated paper maquette made as a compositional aid during the early stages of planning the book.

David: Much of your preparatory-stage work for illustration is built upon the idea of the jointed maquette, so animation is a perfect fit. And of course you’ve made many frame animations in the past, for example on your stage productions of Hansel and Gretel and The Soldiers Tale. By now you and I had made many animations together, almost all set within the bounds of a toy theatre. The images of Beowulf were so exciting to imagine unshackled and animated into life. They were perfectly suited to the medium.

Clive: Because we felt some animation sequences could enhance the promotional video Folio would be sure to make to launch the book, I decided to ask them whether they might consider permitting us to submit a couple of trial animation sequences by way of introducing the team to the idea. Luckily they were open to that and you began work almost immediately. 

I recall conversations we had about the ‘character’ of the animation, degrading the imagery to make it look almost like ‘found footage’ with that sense of vintage film scratchiness and fluttering. You might have different recollections to me, but among references we discussed there was the idea to animate the dragon almost as if it were some kind of nematode worm being filmed on a slide under a microscope. I think I may have mentioned the title sequence for the film Seven to you, with its sense of flickering unease. And then of course there was our shared passion for Smallfilms and the work of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin. It’s just not possible to be in a world of Norsemen without having a conversation about Noggin the Nog.

David: Ah yes! The David Fincher/Smallfilms mash up. I loved your suggestion of a squirming dragon as a micro-organism under magnification. It adds an edge of discomfort to see inserts of a different texture, speed and animation style within the piece. I used the same concept in the jerking movements of the wolf and the tentacles whenever they appear.

Above: black original ink drawing and the digital translation to colour in the book.

David: Tonal changes are essential to my mind, especially when the piece is very dark, or heavily stylised. The most incredible imagery in a movie can actually become dull after a while, unless the viewer is shaken out of it – like a little hit of spice. I watched versions of scenes of the Beowulf animation without the degrading filters we talked about. Your drawings moving across the screen were so striking without the added optical effects that I found it tough to dull them down. Nevertheless I added scratchy inclusions of scrabbling colour to make the films glow and dull in turn, and the decision worked wonders in unifying the animations and the sequences of the book itself. One of the things I had to keep reminding myself was that this wasn’t a trailer for a movie, but for a beautiful book. (The Hitchcock in me was forever edging it to a movie trailer.)

Clive: We waited with bated breath once the sample shots had been delivered to the Folio team, but when the responses came they were wholeheartedly enthusiastic. Far from delivering a few short cuts to be edited into a promotional film, we were tasked with producing the whole shebang. After a briefing Zoom with the team at Folio we got working. There were to be 2 x 30 second films, one at a format for viewing on smart-phones, and a second for viewing on laptops and tablets.

David: Oh weren’t they wonderful? They showed such faith in us that I did feel confident about how it would turn out. Working with such carefully considered and rendered drawings I knew the results would be beautiful. Like cooking with the best ingredients. Although the brief was for 30 second films, I overshot and both edits came in at one minute and six seconds. I think just over the minute stands up very well. I would have been pushed to get the pace right in 30 second films.

Clive: I agree. 30 seconds would have been too rushed. As the films stand, each at just over a minute, they fly by when watching them.

As with all our animation projects, once we’d discussed I absented myself to concentrate on sourcing the music. You in the meantime were off like a rocket. I remember your utter confidence that you knew where to go with all this, waiting only on the music to provide the structures to the films. You were not just animator on the project working to my brief. You were now Animation Producer!

David: And a very cocky one at that, due in no small part to the confidence and enthusiasm you demonstrated in allowing me to hack up and rearrange your artworks.

While you researched the music, I got busy anatomising your Beowulf characters to assemble a cache of puppet elements. You always show an astonishing faith in me to infill the drawings when I amputate an arm, head or leg, or need to find fingers or a neck. I in turn feel safe in the knowledge that you’ll always find the perfect piece of music which will make the pace, depth and rhythm of the story appear clearly in my head. This time you found four tracks, one of which though amazing, we both thought a little too disturbing. (Maybe it’ll be right at another time for another film.) I viewed the films hundreds of times when making them, and have watched them many times since completion. I’m confident the two music pieces we settled on had just the right aesthetic, power, drive and primal drama. People report that they watch them repeatedly, and a big part of that is because the music makes them so moreish. 

Above: click to view this animated book-trailer for the new Folio Society edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.

Artist: Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Animation Producer: David W. Slack

Mares’ Tails

In her poem Mares’ Tails Catriona Urquhart recalls the narrator’s unease at the sight of linen bed-sheets on his mother’s washing-line. In this and all but two of the titles in the poetry collection, the poet ventriloquises her subject, my father, Trevor. Catriona was a great gatherer of stories, and in her years of friendship with my father, she collected and stored many of his. She winkled out of him far more than he’d ever shared with his family. I think he was unguarded with her, and recalled his life with real pleasure.

Mares’ Tails

I lie

and coax the clouds down

from the sky

and grab the mares’ tails

and fly

far up

into the blue 

and gazing down see

all my landscape

small and strange and new.

The church tower squat and square,

the lilac shadows of the vicar’s yews,

the brook, a silver eel

that snakes around the patient cows,

mere dots of brown.

Ed Hockey, bicycling from the town

seems not to move.

My mother’s washing line

is pegged with people:

Joan and Hetty billow out

but Herb hangs limp

and Vince is twisted at the end.

The linen sheets

that pinion me at night

encasing me in wild dreams,

terror, nightmare,

are waving free

so innocently.

You could not think

 they meant to choke and smother.

Catriona Urquhart (1953 – 2005)

It was so very easy to share with Catriona, because when she loved a person she bestowed her full attention and appreciation. Trevor revelled in that. They used to go off on little adventures together, him whisking her away to his favourite country pubs and beauty spots around Monmouthshire, or his regular Italian cafe for lunch in Newport’s docklands, where Maria always had his place set for him. These were his late years and Catriona, who was reeling from the loss of her father, found comfort in mine. Trevor loved this late-blooming friendship, unlikely though it was. He twinkled in her company. They both twinkled.

Trevor didn’t make it into the new millennium. He died at age eighty-six in 1999. He’d been eighty-four when he’d opened up and shared with us the strange event of his childhood that had shaped his life, so there had been just two years for us – for me and Catriona – to gather what facts we could of the occasion when the midwinter mummers had called at his home and Trevor, who was just a toddler, believed the Devil had come for him. It was unlikely that in the hurly-burly of excitement anyone present saw or recognised the effect of the child’s encounter with a ‘Mari Lwyd’. (Grey Mare) Thereafter Trevor believed with the simple certainty of a child, that if ever he spoke of what he’d witnessed, then the Devil would return to carry him away. And because he never told another soul, the memory stuck. He didn’t recognise it for what it was – a celebratory folk tradition – because in imagination it had grown into something private and terrifying, an atavistic horror carried with him into adulthood and hidden away from sight. He simply had no idea that the Devil was a decorated horse’s skull on a stick, with the capering operator hidden beneath a shroud-like draped bedsheet.

All his life Trevor was terrified of entangling sheets, whether too tight on beds or cracking in winds on washing-lines. He never read a ghost story, not a single one, but had he laid eyes on M. R. James Oh Whistle and I’ll come to You My Lad, he wouldn’t have got into a bed again, ever. In hospital, at the end, with his dreams resurrecting old fears, he fought with sheets tucked tight by caring nurses to prevent him falling out of bed. I loosened him and murmured soothingly, stroked his forehead and told him everything would be fine. And then at the end, it was, and he was still.

Catriona died on May Day in 2005. She was a mere fifty-two. She’d been drifting on a tide of Morphine, surfacing infrequently, briefly and peacefully in those last weeks, cared for by those who loved her and the wonderful Macmillan nurses, tending and vanquishing her pain. It’s said she chose her time, May Day having always been significant for her, so perhaps at some deep level she knew the calendar date and took her leave on the day she loved.

The Mare’s Tale was the sole volume of Catriona’s poems published in her lifetime. The poems were originally intended as the text for my 2001 exhibition of the same title, but when Nicolas McDowall of Old Stile Press came to our house and found her manuscript on our kitchen table, he decided the collection must be suitably honoured in a beautiful edition. And so it was, illustrated by me, printed by Nicolas at Catchmays Court in the Wye Valley, bound in super-fast time by The Fine Bindery and published by Old Stile Press. Launched at the opening of the exhibition at Newport Museum and Gallery, it was the only collection of poems published in Catriona’s lifetime. She destroyed all her earlier work, a fact discovered only after her death. She was always hardest on herself, and had clearly taken in hand what she chose to be remembered by. The Mare’s Tale is a small masterpiece and we are lucky to have it. She was a wordsmith down to her bootlaces.

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, May Day 2023

Tomcat in the Red Room

I find myself feeling sad, a condition, increasingly, of our times. Back in 2013 the book blogger known as Tomcat in the Red Room wrote a dream review of Marly Youmans’ novella/poem, Thaliad, published by Phoenicia. Now Thaliad is a jaw-dropping literary achievement by any standard, but Tom wrote a review which beautifully cast a net to ensnare readers who may not otherwise have found it. When I read his words I rejoiced, because he really understood what a talent Marly is, and eloquently conveyed the fact. I know it, but no-one is going to listen to me. Marly and I have been working together for nearly twenty years, and so when the long-term collaborator says “Read this woman’s work. She is a genius!”, people might well reply “Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

So here is Tom’s book-report, so insightful, tender, and clear-sighted. I discovered today that his blog is no longer active, or even viewable. I don’t know whether he still writes online, or even, given the events of the past few years, whether he is still with us. I will forever be indebted to him for what follows.

Tom Cat in the Red Room on Thaliad.

It seems that post-apocalyptic narrative is definitely on a roll here in the early 21st Century; what with Cormac McCarthy, China Mieville, David Almond etc. all turning to the genre in recent years. Marly Youmans’ ‘Thaliad’ is an unusual addition to the field, but it’s also one of the best examples I’ve ever read. ‘Thaliad’ has a commonality with The Road in that it comes from a literary tradition decidedly outside of the SFF mainstream: it’s a mythopoeic epic poem about seven children attempting to survive the aftermath of some non-disclosed apocalyptic event referred to only as `The Fire’. One of the children, a girl named Thalia, soon emerges as the de facto leader of the group, and together they settle in the ruins of an abandoned village on the edge of lake Glimmerglass. What follows is a desperate and genuinely moving cling to life that’s equal parts bleak and uplifting, harrowing and hopeful.

A lazy crib would be: `The Road meets Lord of the Flies in verse’, but such a label, however succinct, fails to encapsulate the sheer inventiveness and lyrical exuberance of Youmans’ writing. Who, for example, could resist such beautiful and strange and violent language as:

Nothing could have halted them from verdict

And vengeance, save angelic messengers

Arrived by unexpected thunderbolt.

A wail went out from Thalia and streamed

Across the mire, across the slough of blood

It’s structurally formal, but the poetry never feels rigidly metered or constrained; a feat entirely due to the beauty, flow and vitality of the writing. Sure it’s heavily stylised in the way you’d expect from epic verse that channels, among others, Homer; but the writing isn’t at all arch or overbearing. Furthermore, the book has some strikingly novelistic traits: chapter divisions, direct speech, and a first person narrator, all of which should act as a helpful way-in for those readers more familiar with novels than poetry.

‘Thaliad’ is composed in blank verse (that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter), and there’s a definite tension between the book’s future-looking, sci-fi-esque premise, and the New Formalist way it eschews free verse in favour of this more traditional approach to rhythm and prescribed syllable count. Wrapped up in this tension between the book’s setting and its form are Youmans’ playful references to the canon of classical epic poetry. The opening line, for example, “It was the age beyond the ragged time” references the first line of The Iliad, with “age” and “ragged” bearing more than a passing phonic and visual resemblance to Homer’s first-line repetition of “rage” (as it’s translated in English, obviously); and this serves as a definite tonal signifier for the poem that follows. Similarly, such chapter headings as `Seven Against the World’ make reference to Greek Tragic drama (as do the frequent allusions to masks), and the text itself is replete with lively puns, such as this clever nod to both the Icarus story and the fabled fluid that supposedly ran in the veins of the Greek Gods (the `ichor’):

The heavens, ichorous, let down a rain

That seemed as if it could have been the blood

Of dying Gods dreamed up in ancient worlds.

The most striking Classical reference is, of course, in the book’s name. Using the titular suffix `-iad’ would have been an act of pure hubris in the hands of less able writers, and initially I was sceptical, expecting Thaliad to be open to accusations of self-aggrandising pomposity and stylistic misappropriation; after all, calling your book `Thaliad’ and hence inviting comparison with Homer could be mistaken as a very cocky move indeed. Happily, there’s a fantastic inter-textual rationale behind this book’s title and its neo-classical form. The narrator (and supposed writer) of Thaliad, Emma, is speaking 60 years after the events she describes, and learnt her trade as a poet-historian by salvaging what books she could (presumably the Classics) from the ruined world’s libraries. So ‘Thaliad’, then, fictionalises the story of its own creation; the book itself is supposedly a piece of history, written as a record of the first years following `The Fire’.

It’s not unlike China Miéville’s post-apocalyptic landscape the `Railsea’, whose inhabitants have re-ordered society through a kind of collective performance of Moby Dick. The world of ‘Thaliad’ likewise addresses the problem of overcoming the apocalypse through an act of textual salvage: Emma and Thalia have re-constructed the world’s history via this filter of Classic literature, and the results are surprisingly uplifting. It really works, but only because the post-apocalyptic setting provides suitable thematic gravitas: no other genre of 21st Century fiction could get away with appropriating the language of classic Greek literature without simultaneously committing some enormous faux pas.

But don’t worry if Homer et al isn’t your particular thing. ‘Thaliad’ doesn’t pre-suppose an understanding of Greek literature, and knowledge of the Classics is not a pre-requisite to fully enjoying this poem. The book’s real appeal is its language, its characters and the heartbreaking decisions they find themselves making. Marly Youmans takes great pains to ensure that ‘Thaliad’ isn’t one of those post-apocalyptic narratives whose characters are mere passive bystanders swept along by Big, Important, Global events beyond their control. Choices made and not-made are the thematic heart of the poem, and for me the book’s most significant event occurs at its very beginning, when the children make their first collective decision: to abandon one of their number, Gabriel, a boy who won’t stop crying:

They shouted at him that he’d learn a thing,

Or two, to not be so unendingly

Unbearable, to weep as all could weep

But did not do.

[…] They drove away.

They drove away! And left that little boy

Alone with bridges, river, blowing ash,

Immensity. He was eleven, a child

The six remaining children soon realise what an appalling thing they’ve done and turn around, hoping to find Gabriel once more, but all to no avail.

The abandonment of Gabriel influences the moral identities of the children more so than any other of the book’s events. Chapters and decades later, it remains the significant episode of their lives, presumably because, unlike `The Fire’, discarding Gabriel is a tragedy of their own contriving. If the apocalypse can be read as a second Fall (and there’s plenty of Biblical imagery at play: “There is no peaceful land, / And gates of Eden long ago clanged shut”), this first decision made by the children is definitely their loss of innocence. On numerous occasions various speakers equate this early naivety with all their future tragedies:

– For where is Gabriel, that child of light,

Who might have been the father of the world? –

[…]

Perhaps the sin of Gabriel, forlorn,

Abandoned on the track has weighted us

Like pocket stones in deepening water.

If you want to be twee about it, you could probably argue that ‘Thaliad’ functions as a metaphor for the end of childhood and the violent emergence into the adult realm of moral responsibility. I wouldn’t tug at this thread too much, but it’s there if you really must.

It would be remiss of me at this point not to mention Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who as well as designing the book’s cover, has illustrated small iconographic vignettes that head each of ‘Thaliad”s twenty four chapters (note: the same number of books divide The Iliad). These striking black and white collages definitely influenced my conception of Thaliad’s world, and the grey-tone in which they’re rendered acts as a satisfying visual call-back to the descriptions of ash and rubble that dominate much of the poem’s imagery. As well as being unusually beautiful, Thaliad’s artwork is loaded with symbolism and connotation. The image that heads chapter twenty three, for example, depicts two of the children (now fully-grown) fighting over Thalia. The icon itself is a silhouette-esque depiction of two men locked in combat, with their swords provocatively placed so as to resemble the positioning of erect phalluses in a way that alludes to the lust that is the deeper subtext and reasoning behind their feud.

Thaliad is an extraordinary, deeply moving and fiercely intelligent poem, and I hope I’ve given some indication of its many achievements. I’ve not written much about the plot because, frankly, it’s difficult to do so without resorting to massive spoilers, but suffice it to say that several of the story’s twists are genuinely shocking, genuinely original. Its greatest accomplishment is the way it successfully melds so many disparate literary traditions into something cohesive, without seams. References to Diana Wynne Jones can be found adjacent nods to Ovid or Cormac McCarthy and Andrew Marvell. It plays with form in memorable and mischievous ways (the first fourteen lines of chapter 18, for example, could easily be isolated as a kind of weird blank verse bucolic sonnet), and it always works. Thaliad is a convergence of genre spaces, and we Science Fiction fans, sometimes so rigid and stubborn in our reading, would do well to embrace it.

In the Realm of Monsters

It’s with huge delight that I can reveal, at last, that my current big project is the commission to illustrate a new Beowulf for The Folio Society, in the acclaimed translation by Seamus Heaney. The illustrations must remain shrouded in secrecy until the book is ready for launch, and I won’t be showing work in progress. Suffice to say that I’m already deeply bedded in the project, awakening every morning excited to be in the thick of it and enormously enjoying the many discussions and planning sessions with my wonderful Folio Society art director, Raquel Leis Allion. But this little vignette is all you’re going to see before the book is published, because we’re keeping the images under lock and key.

I’ve greatly enjoyed the notion of ‘the monster’, whether in novels, in film/tv or in folklore and mythology. Aged eight I was sold on the idea of the ‘Gorgon’ from the first moment I read about her, and the Hydra, too, and the three-headed Cerberus, guard-dog of Hades. As a child, when too young to actually see X-rated films, I pored over imported copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland, so I knew all about the Universal Studios monsters – which were vintage even back in the fifties when they were being given lush spreads in the magazine – long before I ever saw the films themselves. I thrilled to the images of Lon Chaney being unmasked in The Phantom of the Opera, of Bela Lugosi curling back his lips in a pasty-faced vampiric leer, and Karloff sitting in Jack Pierce’s makeup chair being transformed into one of the most iconic monsters of cinema history.

I’m not a fan of all ‘horror’ – in extreme form I find it distasteful – but when makers are creative in producing something that nails you to your seat, the ride can be thrilling. I particularly love it when the scary bits are not too in-your-face. One of the greatest strengths of Alien, is that it pre-dated CGI, and so the fully-grown creature is half-shadowed and all the more alarming for it. I think the best scares in Jurassic Park are in the kitchen where a pair of Velociraptors hunt down the children, because most of what you see is staggeringly clever animatronics and puppetry, made even better by masterful editing. When the monster is actually there, in close contact with the actors, and not just a man in green wielding a ball-on-a-stick to cue their eye-lines for special effects to be added later, there are worlds of difference in the performances.

I’ve particularly enjoyed it when I’ve been given illustration opportunities to engage with old-school classic creatures. For the cover of These Our Monsters (2019, English Heritage), I was able to trace back to Bram Stoker’s account of Vlad Dracula, which was quite an eye-opener because the original descriptions are not remotely like any of the character’s film incarnations. (The cover image here is for The Dark Thread by Graeme Macrae Burnet, who sets his troubling and elegiac short story in Whitby at a time when the mentally fragile Stoker has returned to confront his own creation.)

There were entirely new monsters in the book, too, and I loved creating what Sarah Hall only suggests in The Hand Under the Stone, which is about as close as I’ve ever come to making a monster inhabiting a similar ‘between-worlds’ plane of existence to those found in the ghost stories of M. R. James which I love so much.

I’ve made several varieties of Witch for two quite different books on the theme of Hansel & Gretel, for a stage production in which she was presented via shadow-puppetry, and for a toy theatre for Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop.

My first Hansel & Gretel book was a more or less textless picture-book for St Jude’s in which there was a Witch scary enough to require a warning for more sensitive readers. I made her glaucous-eyed and short-sighted – as witches traditionally were in some folk and fairy-tales, the Grimm Brothers telling of Hansel & Gretel included – but I dressed her in a garment embroidered with eyes to send out a different kind of message. (I stole the idea from a portrait of the first Queen Elizabeth in a gown embroidered with eyes and ears, as a coded message to her subjects – and more particularly her enemies – that the monarch saw all and heard all!)

A short-sighted Witch in a garment sewn with many eyes

For the Simon Armitage version of the tale, Hansel & Gretel, a Nightmare in Eight Scenes, I collaborated with paper-cut artist Peter Lloyd, providing him with rough drawings that he then transferred into elaborate stop-motion shadow-puppets. To begin with Hansel and Gretel saw only a crone in a bonnet and cloak, but when the cloak came off, the full horror of a spiny crab-like carapace was revealed, reverse-joint legs – like a bird – and a tail with a stinger that snaked into view and coiled and thrashed about.

Guide drawing for Peter Lloyd’s shadow puppets

Close up hands for the Witch created by Peter Lloyd

Animating a large Peter Lloyd shadow-puppet Witch’s head, used for close-ups

When Simon Armitage’s libretto for the stage production was published in 2019 as an illustrated book by Design for Today, I made a monstrous Witch – seen below as she’s turned into a gobstopper when Gretel pushes her into a cauldron of sweets boiled down into molten sugar – and a monstrous personification of the haunted forest, too, wonderfully described by the poet in a text that’s an illustrator’s dream.

The Witch transformed into a gobstopper

The personification of a fairytale haunted wood

Beowulf is jam-packed with the eponymous hero’s encounters with monsters of many varieties. There’s a deep-sea-creature that drags him to watery depths, a dragon he slays – though he becomes fatally wounded in the process – and that arch-monster of literature and father of all horrors that came after him, Grendel, who is of a sufficient size to stuff thirty human corpses into a bag and make off with them. Beowulf tears off Grendel’s arm as a trophy, and the fatally wounded monster slinks away to die ‘off-stage’. We then discover there’s worse waiting in the wings, for Grendel has a mother, and she’s as wrathful as a nest of Asian Hornets on the warpath when she sets out to avenge her son’s death. (And you thought the vengeful mother was invented by the makers of the second Alien film. Turns out that she goes back to Anglo-Saxon literature, and before that to even more ancient mythologies and tales.)

So I am thrilled to be making images of these archetypal monsters, and hopefully in ways that will be unexpected and visceral enough to raise a few hairs at the nape of the neck. But in a good way, of course.

The Poet Thief

I lift the latch of a blue-painted iron gate under the trellis archway laden with the Rambling Rector rose that was the gift of my sister, and enter the garden past the reading-bench tucked to my left under the umbrella canopy of a weeping crab-apple.

Pausing only briefly to admire the unlikely olive tree that has survived in the shelter of this place, I skirt the trimmed box-bushes now grown to the size of large sea-boulders and the myrtle propagated from a sprig stolen by a Scottish poet from a shrub in the grounds of a royal residence, grown from a sprig pulled from a nosegay given to Queen Victoria in 1845 by Prince Albert’s grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Saxe Gotha.

The olive tree in the circular bed, with the myrtle grown from a stolen sprig to the right beyond it.

I ascend a grassy bank springy with tussocks and clustered with primroses to the ruins of the myrtle thief’s chair, still at the uppermost part of the garden, where in her last evenings with us she sat in the dusk among the flicker of hunting pipistrelle bats, the glimmer of the illicit Gauloises betraying her secret vice as I anxiously watched for her while washing the supper things.

My beloved friend Catriona Urquhart died early on May Day 2005, at home in Caerleon with her partner Ian, her mother and siblings and nephew and niece around her. I was sitting in the chair at the top of the garden in Aberporth thinking about her when the call came with the news. I’d spent time with her the previous week, squeezed her hand and whispered my goodbyes to her closed, peaceful face. 

Seventeen years have passed, and still she is with me. Here at Ty Isaf the stick-in-a-pot she gave us is now a walnut tree nearly thirty feet high. Her collection of poems with Old Stile Press, The Mares Tale – still available from OSP – continues with its power to make me weep, because I feel as raw and bereft as I did on the day of her departure. But I laugh, too, whenever I see the myrtle, because Catriona was emphatically not a Royalist, and she would positively crow with delight to see the fruit of her thieving doing so well in this west Wales cottage garden.

The Mare’s Tale

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