Burning Bright

‘Painting the Mersey in 17 Canvases’ (Hazel Press, 2022), Maria Isakova Bennett: Painterly aesthetics in poetry of place & origin.

The Mersey is a constant presence in this beautifully produced 24-page pamphlet from Hazel Press.  The cover is gorgeously  illustrated by Jeff Fisher in stunning blues.

‘Painting the Mersey in 17 Canvases’ was launched on 21 May 2022 at Open Eye Gallery, a perfect venue as it is so close to Liverpool waterfront and the river. The event also provided a showcase for a range of artists including photographer Ron Davies, artist Michael Wright, musician Nick Branton,  as well as Carole Bromley and Barbara Hickson, poets included in the Coast to Coast to Coast series , an initiative developed and directed by Maria Isakova Bennett.

Isakova Bennett asks how we look at, see and understand our places of origin in these tender and intimate poems.  She approaches this task with a painterly eye and the heart of a potential exile in her new pamphlet with Hazel Press and her fourth publication since 2015. Here, the river Mersey is a living body of history, memory and a source of poetry for Isakova Bennett and it is in keeping with her aesthetics of making, textures and visual creation that she frames her precise, eloquent lyric poems as canvases. She considers the river as a lover:

            I take you into the quiet of me like a prayer

            regard you from the shoreline to sky, over

            and over until I feel I know you.

                                                                   (‘From the River Explorer’ p.7)

Although each poem uses a specific vantage point such as Coburg Wharf, the Waterfront, Pier Head, Burbo Bank these are delicate love poems rather than psychogeographic explorations, with the Mersey as the beloved elusive focus of observation, emotional response and muse.  Sometimes the river is a synaesthetic soundscape:

            listen to its slow churn

            and wait for an accolade of water-stars

            You can try to forget, but their pitch

            will never leave you.

                                          (‘Coburg Wharf looking South and North’ p.12)

Sometimes the river is a ghost-town, as in ‘River Mersey from the Echo Arena’ (p.17):

            Pods have been removed from the Liverpool Eye –

            Hollow socket, a ghost of itself

            Pubs are shuttered and the buskers gone

                                                                                …

The poems carry changing light, colour, people, meditations through paint, architecture, weather, journeys on water, birds, sky, winter and memories and the reassurances of the wild world.

            I was born close to you

            And when I lose all sense of me

            I hug your waterline

            There is no distinction between us

            I am and you are

                                      …

                                                 (‘Where the Mersey reaches the Sea’ p.23)

This is poetry of close and careful observation, sensual and deceptively simple. It rewards many readings and is a perfect gift for artists interested in words, poets interested in paintings and people from Liverpool, whatever their disposition.

To purchase a copy of the pamphlet click on the link:                               Painting the Mersey in 17 Canvases

For further information about Maria Isakova Bennett’s work:                 Coast to Coast to Coast

This is my Day 1 publication choice for the Sealey Challenge 2022.