Reviews
Poet, photographer marry words, images beautifully
By GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE
POETRY CAN HARMONIZE with other media, particularly music, film, art, and photography. Words can be plastic and fluid enough to cohabit suggestively with visual (not just dreamt) images.
Yet, as with music, the relationship between poetry and picture is a fraught one. It’s rudely easy, for a drawing, painting, or snapshot to say one thing and for the accompanying "speech" to dispute it: or for one art form to be more diminishing explicit — or literal — than the other.
Wings to Fly: Poetic Images, Inspiring Words (Om Studio, $24.95) works to strike the right balance.
Featuring photos by Joanne Chilton (a P.E.I. native raised in Springhill) and poetry by Jeanne Ripley (rural N.S.-born, now a Dartmouthian), Wings to Fly is — as its subtitle and its Glen Margaret publisher’s name attest — a work meant to provoke meditation.
In her preface, Ripley hopes that her verses will help one "to go within and to find your own light." Likewise, Chilton hopes one will respond to the book "with an opened eye and heart."
Composed over the course of four years, beginning with Chilton submitting images to Ripley who "responded with a poem," and then continuing on with a playful reversing of "the creative process," Wings to Fly fuses eye and brain richly — in places.
The first pairing, Choices, works finely. A photo of a Halifax Harbour café window, with a ship’s bow, a slice of George’s Island, and the refinery in the background, plus empty chairs and a table in the foreground, accompanies insightful verse: "You choose this place / to tell me a truth I would not face, / because you know I can not escape. // Still, even with your hand in mine, / out there seems real / and inside are fears I cannot name."
The poem and picture reinforce each other: the poet limns convincingly a potential, underlying narrative of the photo.
Similarily strong is, All That, a coupling of a grainy close-up of bread loaves (that resemble leaves) and adjacent lyric — the free verse and white space allow terrific room for thought: "cracked / crusted / lined // it is all that / and still succulent. "
Many poems resolve to be proverbs. Success tells us , "This side cannot hold you back / only your doubt can … / Success is just another try away. / Failure only a pint of view." The sentiment faces a photo of two youths on the southend Halifax container pier site, one or both of whom may be homeless (or posed to depict a condition of drifting.) But the moral is cliché, though the image is interesting.
Indeed, while it is possible for most of the photos to stand alone, the same may not be true of most poems. Too, some verses offer good insights, but would be stronger if leaner. (See Metaphor Lives here).
But this book marks Ripley’s debut as a poet. Moreover, different readers will find different poems to enjoy as their own intelligences establish connections between text and pictures.
And some combos function magnificently. See Fur Elise, which connects the image of "tendrils suffused with symphonic sound" and the notion that "Music is everywhere" with a photo of a skinny, budding plant moving with the wind.
Wings to Fly is a beautiful work for reflection.
George Elliott Clarke, a Nova Scotia-born author and poet, is a literature professor at University of Toronto. In 2001, he won the Governor General’s Award for poetry.