news Archives - Frances Presley

Sallow

Sallow, by Frances Presley with images by Irma Irsara, 24pp, Open House, 2016,

from Leafe Press, www.leafepress.com £4.50 (inc. postage), £6.50 RRP.

Sallow continues a sequence of poems about the languages of trees, especially those used by or for women, Halse for hazel (Shearsman, 2014). Sallow is both a species of willow and dull skin: its dual meaning is found in the title poem, where ‘sally’ is dialect for sallow and a girl’s name. As well as local dialect, I use the languages of forestry and botany, analysing and reassembling them. I benefited once again from the guidance of botanist and poet Libby Houston.

Halse for hazel began on the hills of Exmoor and in Sallow I wanted to explore trees in low lying, wetland areas, such as willow and alder. The sequence maps political and environmental pressures, as well as recent catastrophic flooding: ‘willow’ was written on a train in the Somerset Levels when the surrounding fields were an inland sea. Many of the poems were written on site which can be hazardous, as it was in swamp carr at Ranworth Broad, but the trees have their own agency, and need to be experienced close up, whether in the wild or the urban edgelands of ‘grey willow’.

The reinvention of language and form is often shaped by the inventiveness of wild trees. Sallow explores the visual patterns we use for trees in the design of the text and visual poetics. ‘Crack willow’ is from a walk with Harriet Tarlo near her home in Yorkshire. I sent her my text, she interleaved a response, and our two versions are printed on facing pages.

The Somerset poems were part of a collaborative performance with Robert Minhinnick which gave them a sharp linguistic and political focus.

Sallow, like Halse for hazel, has been a dialogue with the work of artist Irma Irsara, my friend and long time collaborator.

Owain Jones in conversation with Frances Presley

(from More Than Human Research 06/12/2013 http://www.morethanhumanresearch.com)

In 2002 Owain Jones (with Paul Cloke) published the book Tree Cultures and since then has kept up a series of conversations with academics, artists and professionals about ‘aboriculture’. Recently, Owain has been in conversation with the poet Frances Presley who became aware of his work on trees through the book. Frances writes poetry and prose on landscape, language, nature and history. Her current Arts Council funded project involves engaging with individual trees in particular landscape settings. In late October, Owain and Frances spent a day visiting trees sites in Bristol and also met with the botanist Libby Houston who is an expert on the rare whitebeam trees that grow in Avon Gorge Bristol. Below is an extract of their conversation and some pictures of the day…

24 October 2013, Arnos Vale cemetery, Bristol.

FP: I am very conscious of the difference between urban space and somewhere like Exmoor, especially the context and extent of it. As an artist you could take a close up of a leaf or a tree and it could be anywhere, but it isn’t. As a writer in London I am conscious all the time of the thinness of it…

OJ: Thinness?

FP: The thinness of the experience in terms of the tree and where it is situated – the fragility of nature before you get back into the urban. It is a completely different experience to having that almost infinite reach you get in wild landscapes. I think trees behave in different ways in the city – as well as people.

OJ: How definable is that?

FP: I think it happens in the work. Using language you draw in more aspects of the landscape and the people who live there, the whole area.

OJ: Some aspects of that must be unconscious.

FP: Yes, there is a richness and density of experience on the moor which makes itself felt in the writing.

OJ: Which is the opposite to thinness I suppose.

FP: But the thinness is also interesting, almost more interesting at times. There are violent juxtapositions, such as the trees and the graffiti on the Parkland Walk in London – a disused railway line. Trees are stressed in the city, even sometimes graffitied, as if they were another brick wall.