Holme Fell: A Sample of Landscapes is the title of a collaboration between myself and Trev Eales, based on, coming out of, springboarding from, his photographs of the Lake District: Holme Fell in particular, and Hodge Close, an old quarry, as its central node or focus. I am going to blog one poem and photograph (and maybe more) once a month, as the project progresses and draws towards its completion and its becoming, or being made, public.
We are in discussion about how to present text and image, but for this blogpost sampling of this ‘sample of landscapes’ we shall present poems and images that relate quite closely together.
Here is a
piece from quite early in the sequence and an image to accompany it.
Heavy blue-grey clouds
low over russet-green pines
surround the old quarry reservoir,
the rock ground peppered with snow.
The water’s surface is frozen,
broken in places, a slow thaw.
The blue-white peaks of the Langdale Pikes
draw back from this arrangement,
a lone tree stretching something like human scale.
My father refused to enter forests and thickets
and he’d have turned away from
the darkening embrace of this wood, preferring
cricket-pitch open spaces, though this frozen expanse
would have also reminded him of the Polish death march.
There’s nobody about, it seems at first,
but the place is humanised
in unprogrammable ways,
by looking.
Zoom in, and you’ll spot two people
one in a blue coat
coming out from the wood, following
the exposed bank of the reservoir.
Trev Eales
is a photographer specialising in landscape photography and rock concerts
and festivals, based in his hometown of Barrow-in-Furness. He and I met at
university in Norwich in October 1974, over half a century ago, and we’ve been
in touch over those years. We meet up regularly in Lancaster for discussions
and entertainment. He has a website here: Trev
Eales Photography. You could spend hours lost in his back-catalogue. Here’s
an interview with him about his work: Capturing
the Festival Spirit with Trev Eales · Lomography. All good things come in
threes, so here’s a third site: Articles by Trev Eales’s
Profile | eFestivals.co.uk Journalist | Muck Rack. This is a list of links
to Trev’s reviews of festivals and gigs for Louder than War, via the Muck Rack
site.
All my information is everywhere on this blog of course, but I did write (but never delivered) a talk on my use of photographs in my writings, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Talk for the Open Eye Gallery on Poetry and Photography December 2016.
