1.

The echo GalleryA Bristol Anthology of Art and Poetry

Philip Lyons

Jane Griffiths

David Briggs

William Wootten

Tony D’Arpino

Rachael Boast

Laura-Jane Foley

Sam Elmi

Adam Hanna

Stephen Parr

Philip Gross

David Sollors

Ralph Pite

Julie-Ann Rowell

A.C. Bevan

Ralph Hoyte

Edson Burton

Kat Peddie

David Clarke

Satyalila

Matthew Barton

Alyson Hallett

2.

The echo GalleryA Bristol Anthology of Art and Poetry

p.2 Epstein’s Kathleen –Philip Lyons

p.3 Private View – Jane Griffiths

p.4-5 Follow Me, after Jeppe Hein – David Briggs

p.6-7 Figure Among Buildings – William Wootten

p.8-9 Pero’s Bridge –Tony D’Arpino

p.10 The Withdrawing Room – Rachael Boast

p.11 First, after Mouthpiece – Laura-Jane Foley

p.12-13 The Hands, after Barbara Hepworth – Sam Elmi

p.12-13 Samuel Plimsoll – Adam Hanna

p.14-15 My Neighbour’s House – Stephen Parr

p.16-17 Small Worlds, for Paul Dirac – Philip Gross

p.18-19 Canvas and the Dead Skins – David Sollors

p.20-21 High Moor – Ralph Pite

p.22 Static, after Railway Lines in Snow – Julie-Ann Rowell

p.23 In response to Delabole Slate Circle – A.C. Bevan

p.24-25 Snarked – Ralph Hoyte

p.24-25 Island – Edson Burton

p.26 Swansong for Leda – Kat Peddie

p.27 Leda, after Karl Weschke - David Clarke

p.28-29 Descent into Limbo – Satyalila

p.30-31 Jacobite Glasses – Matthew Barton

p.30-31 Encircling Song – Alyson Hallett

2.

Sit still. Don’t pout. The artist needs his muse.That woman has the patience of a saint,but as his mistress how can she refuse?

The years go by. She waits for him to choosebetween his wife and her without complaint.She’ll sit it out. The artist needs his muse.

He moulds her head and shows her how to pose – one arm across a breast – while she feels faintwith hunger, mistress who must not refuse

the artist’s exhortations lest he losethe ecstasy that’s brought him to this point,his love for her. The artist needs his muse.

Immortal work in bronze, you can’t excusethe man and yet you seem so radiant,as if to say no mistress could refuse

the lure of permanence. Is art a ruseor can it be a model of restraint?Sit still. Don’t pout. The artist needs his museand as his mistress she will not refuse.

Philip Lyons

Epstein’s Kathleen

Kathleen [1935] , Jacob Epstein, City Museum

and Art Gallery

3.

It might start as an exercise in composition –the slant upright of the steeple demanding

a counterweight smooth as an eye-socketor stone pooled in the shallows of the harbour.

This gives him the basics – the eyeself-enclosed, the pull of the world outside

and the palimpsest of mug, vase, bottle intimatewith a life-time’s habit of being looked at.

The way the steeple doesn’t blot the headland,the way the chapel lists above the town

he’s not painting the coast, boat, and housesbut years of passing through them unassumingly

in his own skin and bone. Like trust,his touch on their thresholds. Like memory,

the matt blanks of yellow, dove, light blue.The self-edged vessels overlapping and overlapping,

the steeple foliate as it never was in naturesay he’s not finished yet – is still marking

life and its parameters in all the roofs of the town.The frames of window, page, and sky hold things

skewed but steady, show them for what they are.

Jane Griffiths

Private View, After Ben Nicholson’s Oval and Steeple

Oval and Steeple [1951], Ben N

icholson, City Museum

and Art G

allery

4.

It beckons you down the slope from the Fort House, a great magnet

drawing you in, past picnicking students lolled on the bank as on chaises-longue,

past cedar of Lebanon, pond and narcissi reflected in its polished-steel panels –

the Mirror Maze.

And though the route’s not difficult – a two-years child could crack it –

the specular planes add another dimension, and that dimension is you, or me,

whoever we might be, out for a stroll and a smoke before post-prandial seminars.

Once inside, you meander the anterooms of your own psyche, the reflection

of your reflection of your reflection echoing out to infinitude,

your sense of self unravelling like thread from a spilled bobbin;

thread that charts the path back (you hope) to the reassuring routine

of that Bristol Tuesday in May still happening, out there, in Repton’s garden;

to traffic, the coffee-machine, the stack of unmarked red books on your desk.

But right now you’ve other concerns; and, what rough beast you hear slouching

from the centre, coming your way – hirsute and cloven like a bad Jesus,

or tame as a castrated pup – depends almost entirely on you.

David Briggs

Follow Me [2009], Jeppe Hein, Royal Fort Gardens, Bristol

Follow Me, after Jeppe Hein

5.

Follow Me [2009], Jeppe Hein, Royal Fort Gardens, Bristol

6.

William Wootten

I

Other temples are imaginary. With walls that figure gods as men and beasts And ceilings that are painted like the sky. Here, amidst the absences Of unruined apses, Priests May keep a child as still as statuary;In clear sight of true heavens and not lie.

Figure Among Buildings

Figure Among Buildings [1945], John Arm

strong

7.

Traders, for a few small coins, will sell A scraggy cockerel at the precinct gates. But wars come and the harvest must not fail. Men will then trade honestly,

Trusting what is costly Sates

Gods, so all that’s wrong may be made well. Our chants once more mix with a mourners’ wail.

II

8.

I don’t need a bridgeA horn of rum yesI had a bridge onceA tree across a stream

My own secretBridge in the woodsThe jungle of homeWhere I was the secret

Till they told meThe real secretSlave boyNot just boy

I was already drunkWhen the poets showed upA dope and a doperThey seemed okay

I spit in their wine anyway

I was dreaming of NevisAnd the shade Of the baobab treeAt Pinner’s house Montravers

Before we came to RacedownAnd Great George StreetWe travelled like corkMy sisters and I

And like cork I went backA floating islandBumping black coralAnd gravestones of sugar

I don’t need a bridgeA horn of rum yesI had a bridge onceA tree across a stream

Tony D’Arpino

Pero’s Bridge

Pero’s Bridge [1999], Eilis O’Connell, H

arbourside, Bristol

9.

10.

The seventh of ten bells on sprung-coilsoutside the basement kitchen is rungby a man in the upstairs drawing room.Such is this house of servitude. So too, the call sounded sometime beforefor a young Devonian to drop inone September afternoon in 1795. Take this as a repetition in the finite mind and in the sweetest way possiblehe never actually materialized,such are the echoes of this house of sugar.

But suppose that one man is reading aloud, pacing the boards, up and down, while another stares at the view of the Cathedral’s medieval towerwhere, later, a marble bust of his own headstands in a stellate alcove. Which leaves a third man who, absenting himself from the game at play, is all the more animated for having noticed a painting of the Avon Gorgeto which his back is now turned.

For he’s just seen how all things are cutfrom the same rock, all things a repeating echo of the mind of God;has seen, in the water, an image of recollection, so much so that everything looks inside out and the ornate room – the bone china, the house of cards on the soft tabletop –will return one day to it’s prima materiawhile we’d remember reality the more for being like a river, not fixed to forms.

Rachael Boast

The Withdrawing Room

The Georgian House, Bristol

11.

I didn’t see it coming at first. I nearly missed it. Those large lips leapt towards me, stained, sensuous, grooved by nature’s hand. In that moment, I miss your eyes. Just your lips exist – artfully pressed together, slightly parted. I feel breathless. I want to reach out and trace this outline, caress those smooth, sculpted lips, rest my finger in the dent above your upper lip, and keep it there. No-one speaks, not a whisper, as this tryst persists in the midst of the gallery. With twisted nerves we’re on display as my lips brush yours for the first time, becoming your mouthpiece.

Laura-Jane Foley

GALLERY NOTES I

Mouthpiece [2002], Patrick Daw, Royal West of England Academy

The Georgian House, Bristol

FiRST

After Mouthpiece

12.

It’s not so much the hands as the handling.The white cupped light cradlinga promise like a child.It offers you diffusenessif you settle your eyes in this bed.

Love, look up.Those are not eyesbut the spirit of eyes.They won’t lie to usor feign to (as doctors do).

In this stillnessthe hum of a defibrillatorand the low drumming of bloodfind their truest expressionas waves of yellow light.

How many have closed the showwith this final apparition;five faceless figures,each one keeping back the nightfall from the sky?

Sam Elmi

The lord of limit holds the linethis summer night near Hannover Quay.

There are no coffin ships: there are torpid houseboatsand flat complexes that mimic old liners.

He is the image of Parnell, his credo in his blazon: ‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no further’.

He keeps watch as the city’s artificial horizon flares and tilts in the portholes of landing planes;

a metamorphic touchstone, a breakthrough describer of limits,fixing the ne plus ultra, and beating the bounds of the possible.

Adam Hanna

The Hands, after Barbara Hepworth

Samuel Plimsoll

13.

The Hands [1948], Barbara Hepworth, City Museum and Art GalleryBust of Sam

uel Plimsoll, H

otwells, Bristol

The lord of limit holds the linethis summer night near Hannover Quay.

There are no coffin ships: there are torpid houseboatsand flat complexes that mimic old liners.

He is the image of Parnell, his credo in his blazon: ‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no further’.

He keeps watch as the city’s artificial horizon flares and tilts in the portholes of landing planes;

a metamorphic touchstone, a breakthrough describer of limits,fixing the ne plus ultra, and beating the bounds of the possible.

Adam Hanna

14.

My Neighbour’s House [1929], Frederick William Elwell. City Museum and Art Gallery

15.

Inside, an eloquent kindness:a drawing room’s pastel shades hint at french windows, and in the corner a piano with music open. It’s early, but already someone has mopped the cloudy floor tiles, and laid a fire that gestures towards warmth.

Already the gardener’s heavy spade labours through claggy loam, and I imaginethe Minster bells ebbing across meadows.And there you are, carefully negotiating the stairswith your book half read.

I want to ask you things: are you disturbed by posturing politics, poverty,the financial crisis? Do you believe literatureand music have an answer? Does God intervene in our affairs? And do you wonder about what’s outside the frame, or hidden in another decade?If you knew, would your faith survive?

I make-believe your world endures intact:with hindsight of course, it seems blinkered, provisional, a dream while some great injustice rages elsewhere, and men, through countless small betrayals, stumble towards war.

Stephen Parr

My Neighbour’s House

16.

17.

The heart of the matter,it seems, is silence. And we seem to need them, these saints of the strange — how they seem to know something

of which even their equations are a shadow-play. To picture it would be ‘like a blind man touching a snowflake’

yet here, fractal-layered as that snowflake, blush-lit like picturehouse drapes for us who love our colours, who’d see in the pure equations only intersecting angles

of transparency, it is, the heart of matter - like a tower, for all the world like Babel except

meant. ‘The smallest imaginable number of words that someone with the power of speech could utter in company per hour = 1 dirac.’ Towers

of silence — earth’s fond tongues unpeeling, as deciduous as autumn, in itself a kind of Fall

into knowledge. There’s a language up there, at the vanishing point of summit, that of... could they be angels, without footing on the earth

or friendship? And let’s not pretend it’s kindness has them part the clouds (sometimes) to open a crack

in matter through which who knows what might come into the world, to blind us. They have to be strange enough themselves to breathe that thin cold air

a little, not enough to bring back words that we could follow even had we ears to hear.

Philip Gross

Small Worlds, for Paul Dirac

Small W

orlds [2001], Simon Thom

as, Anchor Road, Bristol

18.

To call Noah was to find one righteous man.The ark is a nursery toy. But this, Noahdelivered to a rainbow’s covenant by a God repenting His creationand turning on it like a cancerkilling its host,is no fancy for a child. To be Noah was to shoulder repentancethrough a street of drowned gossipsand know the coins shingling in his pocket had valueuntil the firstgout of raindrops in the dust. It was pairing the clean and unclean in the hoof-pace and quarrel of species,breathing a meaty stench of dung and straw and beast. To imagine Noah

was to hold all this safe on a canvas of ochre and sienna:

the proud horse sculpted from the field, the stag and doe copied from the forest, swans learned on a royal lake,the she-cat cheated from a sketch. It wasdreaming of unicorns and rebuilding the hare from an empty skin. Rooms shalt thou make

in the Ark, and also here, where a thylacine decays imperceptibly. Stuffing, a glass pair of eyes shall remain, and teeth and a name

with other names: the coarse-skulled Aye Ayeslaughtered by fear, the six-plumed bird of paradise, the king and gorgetsummarised by their own plumage, the hippo yawned to a tongue of broken plaster

and, caped in stolen feathers,a question-mark at the exit, is a toy of the Dodochallenging Where to the Ark and Why to Man and Gone to God.

David Sollors

Canvas and the Dead Skins

Noah’s Ark [c. 1710], Jan G

riffier, Cuty Museum

and Art Gallery

19.

20.

although gliding did become his great forty-something love, it never lifted him into somewhere lofty or bland-serene.

he did a mural in Liverpoolusing enamel paint on basicwhite kitchen tiles:‘The Conflict of Man with the Tidesand the Sands’.

it was, he said, “a visualizationof researchinto the mechanism of waves [...] the movementof solids suspended in water”

a body hanging inthe air.

•

and so he gives a tautflat canvas the requisitecrumpled, English-Bohemian look

of his loyal objections: passionate(oh yes), raggedy, spookedby the everyday slicing out

of things from their surroundingthings, the eye’s mining;

both hand and footin a great panic until they hit the ground

and maketheir surface.

High Moor

Dense, cacophonous spooling of the mindas it tangles with the elements –

well, if only those! and not the wind-ing gear, overgrown and reprocessednineteenth-century post-industrial scene: an engine-house at the intersection of four attractive blocks of pasture(its chimney a pater familias standing behind his seated wife, so patient while the photographerdiscreetly enters the hide)

these, the assignedremains were his limitsand tools:

a wall as rough and fissuredas the sea(look! all the way down there, all the way that tiny glimmer of silver, one of the shoals) with its foam graffitiits floppy and violentcar-crash finishing-pointa blast of paint on the wild, liberating extentthe expanse of sand.In the remote shadowy dellgleams a miniature farm:a jet bead of roadgrit rainwater transformed

21.

High Moor [1962], Peter Lanyon, City Museum and Art Gallery

or a sheepfold, a cairna heap of stonesor one stone wheretrailing cloud vapour

sheens hart’s tongue fernlichens’ duck-egg green,jewels huddled juniperthe bird’s wing of uprooted heather.

You should take a breatherhere, one breath atleast, oneminute

the painting says, I knownothing aboutpainting. I put these things out together into

the world where it’s impossibleto tellif this or that swerveis call

or response,so that you should take one breath at a time, disrobe yourself of mapcase, waterproofand hear tongue-click of the streamlet through velour of moss

hear your sunken footprints collect the backrush of water pressed outthat visiblewiry thrum of confluence.

Ralph Pite

22.

Looking across the parallels that refuse snow, to the houses,I note their chimneys uneventful, and a thin line of varnished blue.

It will be a short day criss-crossed by engine steam, but for a breath, the lines don’t sing. I feel I could jump the fence,

run straight across marking the unadulterated whitewith the soles of my trainers – a forensic detail,

invading the stillness, creating a wobblebefore another train judders into view;

empty railway lines aren’t quite right or chimneys without smoke,houses without people, a naked tree.

Static, after Railway Lines in Snow

Railway Lines in Snow [1921], Marjorie Sherlock, City Museum and Art Gallery

Pertaining to or characterized by a fixed or stationary condition.

Showing little or no change: a static concept; a static relationship.

Lacking movement, development, or vitality: The novel was marred by static characterizations, especially in its central figures.

Sociology . referring to a condition of social life bound by tradition.

Electricity . pertaining to or noting static electricity.

Julie-Ann Rowell

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Static

23.

Not a pile of bricks in the Tate,but slateson the parquet floor of the City Museum,a hundred & seventy four of them(& counting on wet afternoons),ferried here by quarrymen,industrial light railway &a weathering of Cornish rains,& laid out as a giant’s causeway Google mapped, Geotagged & localised to scale, or a fell field glacially displaced,ring-fenced, then rearrangedin a climate-controlled gallery space,yet, according to the attendantblurb, it’s ‘a concentrated field of force’suggestive of our presencein the ever-changing landscape,mankind with nature offsetin an eco-balancing act… either that, or perhaps a Banksy mural has collapsed

A.C Bevan

In Responce to Delabole Slate

Delabole Slate Circle [1997], Richard Long, City Museum and Art Gallery

Railway Lines in Snow [1921], Marjorie Sherlock, City Museum and Art Gallery

24.

Teeming trackLamb and wolfCheek by jowlStrut and slinkPass part collideBound atomisedFate turns on a dial

Floating islandImpressed upon sky.Aqueous African angels –Loving dynastic line

Grace lit wisdomCaptured in sinous reliefPlane to be reachedBeacon in the mist. Edson Burton

Snarked

And the ninth wave carried him to shore wheresea exploded around his raiment and his gimletgaze bored wormholes through blood-redhorizons and took in empires concubines slavesspices The Glory of God and The King(whichever God and whichever King wouldstump up the dosh amen) his wife his mortgagedang him if them cod didn’t swarm thick enoughto walk from sea to shining sea long aforeObama colossus-like bestrode a pre-packedAmerikee half a millennium ago from then the Viking surfed athwart the heaving main and Spread-eagled their tennis-court lungs to be Skalded oh that still out there ebullientScrounger whose great whites are invited to theNew World feeding frenzy in transports ofMathew-machined bulimia her barnacleschortle to raas we remain yoked to the vibrantstanchions of Nutopias fe fi fo fum swab thedecks sailor yo and discover LAND AHOY he iswrithen round the escutcheon of futures whereEris singeth off triplets to gnaw at his elephantine guts we are still snarked for the gosuck on a lemon 1497 is not twenty eleven theducks had different feet then

Ralph Hoyte

Island

25.

Statue of John Cabot [1985], Stephen Joyce, Harbourside, Bristol

All Our Tomorrows, Valda Jackson, St. Paul’s Learning and Family Centre, Bristol

26.

After Karl Weschke

After Michelangelo/Leonardo/Yeats/Ovid/Homer

After Troy

Post Coital

‘Late’ Capitalist

Staring down the grubby swan stares back at muscularbody (we do). You must think he has fallen very far to this dingy quarry. Holding this stretched moment before is your power, and all you were allowed.Leda we do not want to let you drop.

Her rape mounts to the lossof voice to gods, governments, market forces. Dressing her in flowers and swooning we lay ourselves (we laid her) open. (ignorant, powerless, screwedova.) The small print says the swan came before the egg that hatchedHelen, who cannot be heldresponsible for those ships any morethan their mariners plotted their own passages to Troy – desired destination alwaysdeferred.

Kat Peddie

Swan song for Leda

27.

I’ve seen the god in the prey of my husband’s hounds,how it leaves muscle and breath as beats are felledlike a breeze that shudders out of a sea of wheat,its only trace a wake of stillness. The courtierswho sharpen their steel for the quarry, the nobleswho cast snagging nets in the forests, are all too bruteand blunted to know what they kill, what never dies –

a drive from deep in the world, it sparks yellowin the swan’s eye, cocks his head, ratchetshis body’s feathered mechanics. The dead glassof lake is leaden as fate, bears no reflection.I hold the neck, stay wings with my fury.Mouth all feathers and blood, I tell him – tonight our terror will beat at the palace walls.

David Clark

Leda

Leda and the Swan [1985-6] , Karl W

eschke, City Museum

and Art Gallery

28.

Christ’s Descent into Lim

bo [c.1470-80] , Giovanni Bellini, City M

useum and Art G

allery

29.

The little one up there, see, in the middle? Him with the trumpet and the curly tail, hovering in the air? He reminds me of that chap at Hogwarts who floats about blowing raspberries, singing dirty songs and hiding in suits of armour.

The poor bloke underneath is clutching his ears – wise man - there’s flames coming out of that trumpet. And the one who’s blowing it’s all cross, I think because the man in white (that’s Christ, I guess) is heading down to set the captives free.

Just back from Venice, I came out for bread and milk;but passing the great glass doors, I wondered…went in and climbed the stairs to see.I totally missed Adam and I didn’t spot Eve.Never noticed the ivy leaves, the fig leaves or the face that’s hidden in the rock.I didn’t clock the discarded nails laid in a cross shape on the ground.Nor did I realise that there was a book crushed beneath the broken-down door.

But, see, the one in white is leaning forward, pulling somebody out of the dark?And that other man beside him is patiently holding his cross - like any guy might hold another’s tools, while his mate just finishes off a job.

Satyalila

Bellini’s ‘Descent into Limbo’ on the way to Sainsbury’s

Christ’s Descent into Lim

bo [c.1470-80] , Giovanni Bellini, City M

useum and Art G

allery

30.

Girl into Reed; Reed into Air; Air into Music [2002], [From Ovid, Metamorphoses], ian Hamilton Finlay

Jacobite Glasses, City M

useum and Art G

allery

31.

Over the bowl of water, look, they raiseglasses that ring like blades, to reddenlips with the freshened secrecy of rose-buds full of future; hailtheir king over the sea. Each glassflashes its helix filament, its bubblerising, blossoming in their hopefulhearts – to burst in crimson at Culloden.

Long bone the fingers that held up these slenderbalusters. But put your earto the cabinet: you might just hear the Earlof Traquair swear to cheers his gates will ne’ermore open save for victory; or skirlof pipes pass through those gates - that stay shut still.

Matthew Barton

Each daycars and vans drive over the poem

rubber tyres hugging slate and steel,letters hummed into the wheels of movingmachines.

People arrive for meetings –

orchestras are unloaded, miles of wires,plugs, the mechanics that make musicpossible.

Later the musicians themselves,cellos strapped to backs, trumpets,flutes, the soles of their shoeskissing the dirt and kissing his work.

They saymusic happens when we bring thingstogether: here the ground singsas it shoulders the circling slate –

the girl, the reed, the air –

a robin walks across grass, leaves dive through an ocean of sky,even this falling rain bends the lighttowards his words.

Alyson Hallett

Encircling Song

Jacobite Glasses

Girl into Reed; Reed into Air; Air into Music [2002], [From Ovid, Metamorphoses], ian Hamilton Finlay

32.

editors - Patrick Burley and Adam Hanna

Design - Andrew Duncan

Photography - Tristan Martin

Poems sequenced by Rachael Boast

The echo GalleryA Bristol Anthology of Art and Poetry

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