Tenter is our latest poetry publication, written by Susie Campbell and illustrated by Rose Ferraby. And it’s beautiful!
When we first began talking to Susie about the book she expressed the feeling that her poems in one sense were not finished – they required something visual, something of texture, something physical. ‘The visual aspect is very important to me,’ she said. ‘The backdrop of the tapestry, its darns, tears, stains and repairs are the template for this sequence. The poems attempt to find a form in which some of these material aspects of the tapestry are realised.’
This was when we thought of Rose.
Rose Ferraby is an artist and archaeologist from Yorkshire. We have worked with Rose on a number of projects, including on Melanie Challenger’s The Tender Map, for which she won the Michael Marks Award for Illustration. Rose is a thoughtful and generous artist, and she is one of our favourite illustrators to work with.
The feature below has been written by Susie and Rose, with images from Rose’s development of the artwork. They talk about war and memory, monoprinting and illustration, and on one another.
Susie
The writing of Tenter came out of what I perceive to be a crisis in the way that this country makes sense of its conflicts and wars. Whilst the wars of the twentieth century continue to attract parades, poppies and civic war memorials, this does not seem to help us to grapple with the complex international realities we face, nor with the refugee crisis on our doorstep.
My sense of a crisis in our response to war was heightened by spending a year as poet-in-residence for the Oxford Brookes/University of Oxford's 2017-18 Mellon-Sawyer Lecture Series on Post-War Commemoration. This residency enabled me to listen to the experiences of veterans, politicians, historians, artists and survivors of genocide. What emerged was a plurality of voice around any experience of war and conflict. All too often, most of these voices are marginalised or ignored in favour of one privileged narrative. We construct simplified histories by suppressing certain experiences and voices, leaving us unable to make any ethical connection between our national acts of remembrance and our current involvement in international wars.
Tenter was written as an attempt to unpick this kind of reductive thinking about conflict and in particular to problematise any notion of memory or language as a translucent and universal conveyor of experience. This meant I needed to find a form that would allow me to include multiple voices, and to engage more interrogatively with both past and present conflicts. Tenter is threaded together by interweaving not just a number of voices but sometimes a chorus of many voices, with the absences, unknowns and re-makings of history finding ways to appear physically on the page.
Before I started writing, I felt I needed to make a physical visit to a site of a battle. The only battlefield close enough for me to reach at the time was the ancient site of the Battle of Hastings. I kept a diary of my visits, recording the slippery, muddy experience of wandering around a small field on the side of a wooded hill. Many things came up for me during those walks: the resemblance between the south of England and parts of northern France, the turning point in the development of English language and culture represented by the outcome of 1066, and, unexpectedly, an upsurge of personal grief as I remembered bringing my mother on a visit to the site a couple of years before she died. This field, this centuries-old battle site, became the ground on which I could explore many of the more abstract ideas in my head.
And, of course, this led me to the great embroidery known as the Bayeux Tapestry. As I researched the making of the Tapestry, the common root of the word for textile and text (textere) began to suggest how I might pull some of these complex ideas into the fabric of the poems themselves.
The Tapestry was made in the workshops of female embroiderers, probably in Kent or the South of England. Whilst the job of these workers was restricted to embroidering a given narrative onto the main body of the Tapestry, they had more liberty to improvise in the margins at top and bottom of the fabric. These margins are filled with lively, sometimes shocking, depictions of creatures, scenes and tableaux providing, in places, a subversive commentary on the main action. This was the starting point of ‘Et Aelfgyva’, one of the main pieces in Tenter. The materiality of the Tapestry, its threads, its dyes, its repairs, patches and stains, became important, linking motifs for the whole sequence.
I knew right from the outset that Guillemot would be the perfect publisher for Tenter because of their commitment to making beautiful books in which the poetry and the design work together, creating a richer set of meanings than either on their own. This is exactly what I was looking for. Tenter is named after the 'tenter' frame on which a piece of cloth is stretched for working (using tenter-hooks). The title emphasises the importance of the visual and the tactile, and so I knew I wanted a publisher who was equally committed to realising the material qualities of poetry. Now that I am holding the book in my hand, I realise just how much the vision and the creative input of Guillemot as a publisher have brought to the finished project.
When I first saw the illustrations made by Rose, it was as though we had collaborated on this project right from the beginning. The tactility of her work, and the sense of fabric, materials and 'making' in her illustrations speak back to the poems in a way that opens up new possibilities and meanings. I particularly love the way she finds abstract patterns in the Tapestry - its eyelets, chain mail, patches and stains - and recreates them to amplify a sense of fraying, patching and re-purposing.
Almost simultaneously, Rose and I reached out to each other to put into words the dialogue that had already started between our work, and so I will turn to her to explain how she came to this project.
Rose:
I remember first coming to Susie’s poems for Tenter. I read them late at night before going to bed. Hovering on the surface of them, they were like gatherings of thread cascading away. I went to sleep and my first thought on waking the next morning was of their tantalising depth. I was caught. Over the next few months I spent a lot of time with them, reading between other bits of work or over a cup of tea. Each time, a new element or aspect of the poems began to grow. They reminded me of my archaeological work; slowly digging and getting to know the landscape in new ways, from the feel of the sediment to the narratives it holds.
To read Tenter was to see the construction of a tapestry, the threads weaving together to form a narrative image. Like the great Bayeux Tapestry, these were poems of war, of memory and remembrance. They were poems of loss and losing, but also discovery and growth: rotting and renewal at once.
What I love about illustrating this poetry is that the poems themselves are already so visual. So as an artist trying to create images which enhance and respect the poems – give them space and provide a rhythm for the book – it is really interesting to live with the poems for a while, and see what atmosphere or feeling begins to grow. Very often I get an idea quite early about the particular look the book might take in terms of space, light, speed, colour, mood. Or a particular technique may jump out as being suitable. With Tenter, I felt early on that a print process like collagraph or monoprinting could offer interesting responses to the textures of the poems.
I used monoprinting to experiment with all kinds of materials and ways of printing to explore ideas of textiles but also the rooty depths of landscape. It was a lovely opportunity to gather bits and bobs, from scraps of fabric in charity shops (in themselves a stratigraphic collection of bodies and memories), the stringy bags of tangerines and forgotten strands of lace curtain: everything took on new possibilities as I imagined my way into the poems once more.
The wonderful thing with monoprinting is the versatility that can be achieved with a roller. Sometimes a form is traced into the ink as the roller passes over, and transferred to paper. Or a negative space is formed as it’s rolled over. Or an old tracing combines with the next to create a ghosting in the ink. What’s more, if you excavate into these and look really closely, tiny details can create vast worlds in the imagination.
Particular lines of poem, or the textural quality of images or shapes, led little exploratory experimentations. Words accumulated and found visual form in the ink: ‘tight weave’; ‘a passage through time moth-holed and embroidered by desire’; ‘freckles’ and ‘particles’; a ‘red tongue outlined in gold’.
I made just over one hundred different prints. Like the poems, I looked through them again and again, letting them sit or drift off in the growing imagined form of the book. Some sung out as instant companions to a particular poem, whilst others stirred and roved. I love the stage of combining text and image. New surprises emerge, and – hopefully – both begin to spark in new and lovely ways. A sense of the book breathing begins to form, a rhythm of noise and silence, trickles and rapids. Gradually the moving of images become small tweaks, until, finally, it seems to sit, just right.
One of the reason I love working with Guillemot so much, is the trust that is put in us illustrators; the real joy in experimentation and growth. The books grow from real, rooted collaboration, tended and nurtured by the Guillemot team. Susie didn’t get to see any previews of the illustrations, and only when they were all produced did she get the chance to see and comment upon them. This reflects a great deal of trust on her part – that the illustrations would complement her hard won words. I am always so nervous at this stage – nervous that I’ve understood the feel and subject of the poems, got to their hidden depths and roving meaning. Poems are personal, and to be let into them, to form part of what they are through the images that talk back and forth with them, feels personal too. A strong connection is formed with the poet, even at a distance. It was therefore a huge relief when Susie responded with such warmth and enthusiasm; like meeting an old friend – someone with whom you’ve shared an experience. The finished book is rooted in people and memory, both in the subject and its creation. Certainly now, more than ever, history and humility should be at the forefront of our minds.
Susie:
Looking at Rose's illustrations, and reading her account of her process, it occurs to me that another way of approaching her illustrations is as a kind of reading, a physical, imaginative reading of Tenter that reaches into some of the spaces in the work and fills them with new possibilities and additional meanings.
To read Rose's words that 'to read the poems was to see the construction of a tapestry, the threads weaving together to form a narrative image' is such an affirming response to what I was trying to do in Tenter. She goes on to say 'they were poems of loss and losing, but also discovery and growth: rotting and renewal at once', teasing out meanings for me that I was barely conscious of when writing the poems. The idea that they are poems of rot and renewal shines a light for me on the way that one poem is succeeded or reframed by another as though an earlier plant has flowered, decayed but seeded the next.
Rose's idea of 'rotting and renewal' also reframes some of what I have thought of as repair. There are places in Tenter where I have patched new voices into old, or where I have pulled much older voices of ballad and traditional song through into stories of later wars. I was emboldened to do this by the repairs, darns and re-stitching that hold together the Bayeux Tapestry. Louise Bourgeois, who worked in her parents' tapestry restoration workshop, was a great believer in the kinship between this kind of repair work and emotional repair. Rose's comment on rot and restoration reminds me that it is the rotting of old fabric, and the decay of memory, that makes room for renewal and for new and imaginative recreations.
Rose's reflections on the process of monoprinting and the way that 'an old tracing combines with the next to create a ghosting in the ink' suggest something of the palimpsest effect I hoped to achieve in some of these poems. Rose's insight here allows me to see my use of linguistic collage and layering of voices as a way of making my peace with the use of the lyric in Tenter. The poem 'Hush' is perhaps the most personal of the poems in Tenter as it struggles to make sense of the place of personal loss within public mourning. It is driven by a lyric impulse but layers up some voices and erases others to create what Rose describes as a 'ghosting in the ink'.
But, perhaps most important of all for me, Rose's illustrations hint at the connection of stitched or fraying fabric with the vulnerability of skin and the human body which brings a deep humanity to the page, and reminds me that compassion, as well as history and humility, should be at the forefront of our minds right now.
Holding this book in my hands, with its thick, tactile paper and print, its ochre colour hinting at old fabric, parchment, camouflage gear and even the Wipers Times, I am proud to say that it is not just my book, but it is a book made through the collaboration of Guillemot, Rose and myself: it is our book. I hope our readers enjoy it.
To order a copy of Tenter please visit here.