Kirjahaku

This book contains a long, new sequence of poems and prose by Frances Presley, as well as a selection of her work since 1996. It provides an important opportunity to see her recent work as a whole, and to appreciate how different sequences interrelate and develop, both in form and theme. Paravane includes ‘Private writing: Vermont journal 1996’, originally published with drawings by Peterjon Skelt, and the important email collaboration with Elizabeth James: ‘Neither the One nor the Other’. There are also extracts from ‘automatic cross stitch’, an innovative collaboration with the artist Irma Irsara focused on dress and fashion; and from the recently published ‘Somerset letters’, which uses experimental prose to explore layers of landscape, language and love. There are two new sections of previously uncollected work. The first ‘Uncollect’ brings together some shorter new poems, including two responses to the work of the installation artist Jane Prophet. Paravane is also the title of a major new sequence, which is a response to the tragedy of 9/11 in New York through various experiments in sound and image. Paravane centres on a walk around the City of London where IRA bombs were detonated, exploring and constructing sites of resistance and dissent. There is a renarration of the legend of Saint Barbara, patron of architects, and other female saints are evoked and reinvented. The unfolding ‘war on terrorism’ and New Labour modernization are spun through and out of the sequence. Sites of resistance are also found outside the city, especially on the high fells in the far north of England. The sequence ends provisionally in Mother Julian’s cell in Norwich, where the walls are porous and a new flame ignites a plastic language.

Frances Presley's "Lines of Sight" brings together all her poems from 'Stone settings and longstones', a sequence framed by the Neolithic stone monuments on Exmoor. The poems reflect the fragile, elusive and even disputed existence of these sites, as well as the enduring landscape which surrounds them. They reveal, too, more recent layers of history, and the creation of new stone settings. The writings of a local woman archaeologist are also a source of rediscovery and radical realignment. This sequence is part of a collaboration and performance with Tilla Brading. Other monuments are engaged with in 'Female figures'. These are the rare statues of women in public spaces. The figures chosen are Queen Anne, Margaret Thatcher and Julian of Norwich, along with the spaces they overlook. The final poetic sequence 'The first book of her life', includes a meditation on the war experiences of Frances Presley's mother, and creatively rereads an old Dutch dictionary and primer, in a search for origins of identity and language.

Halse is Exmoor dialect for hazel, as transcribed by local historian Hazel Eardley-Wilmot: a convergence of names which initiates a new poetic syntax of marginal trees and tongues. Halse for hazel has three sections, Halse, Col and Hassel: alternate and playful names for hazel, which map wide ranging geographic and linguistic areas, as well as political and environmental pressures. Halse begins with Exmoor tree names and ends with Lorna Doone, while Col moves from an irreverent Celtic tree alphabet to Atlantic woods in Scotland where hazel dominates. Hassel takes us from the devastation of Oak Change, after WWI, to the naming of hidden whitebeams in Avon Gorge. Much of Halse for hazel, like Presley's earlier sequences, Myne and Lines of sight, is 'blind writing', when the eye and mind focus on the landscape rather than the page, although what we see and how we see are more at risk. The visual design of the text is shaped by the language of trees and their strange physical evolution, in dialogue with the images of Irma Irsara. The book also contains a recent collaboration with American poet and artist Julia Cohen, commissioned for Likestarlings.

The Sex of Art was Frances Presley's first collection, from 1985. Although much of it has reappeared in other guises, in Paravane and also in Shearsman's own Myne (2006), the entire book has not been republished and its structure - mixing prose and poetry freely - is unclear if one does not see as it was originally conceived. This edition gives the work a little more air than in the original - avoiding run-on texts - but is otherwise unchanged.

`Mathematical Science is the language of the unseen relations between things', wrote Ada Lovelace, mathematician and computer visionary. She had a home on Exmoor and this landscape is reimagined through a combination of science and poetics, also part of a collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading, ADADA:landescape. Ada loved birds, especially song birds, and studied the theory of flight. In a series of poems about birds and flight some are designed like punch cards to isolate key words and create an alternative text for a woman's life. The third sequence explores, through a 21st century lens, various aspects of the 'unseen' which were of interest to Ada: these include the human body, computing, music, the imaginary, and dark matter. There is also an internet cut up and paste on the word `Ada' and copious notes. In Frances Presley's new exhilarating and intellectually stimulating collection, the life and work of Ada Lovelace - innovator in the science of computing, but also lover of birds and music - is both focus and trigger. The concepts of the seen and the unseen in science, poetry and social mores permeate this volume, including contemporary society's blindness to ecological destruction and the historical suppression of women. Creative tensions between the closed and open, the algorithmic and the intuitive, science and nature weave their way deftly through the book in a profusion of evocative and often witty allusions to birds, flight, landscape, architecture, computation and mathematics. Through ambiguous voices, shifts in time and location, quotation, word play, cut and paste, visual patterns and accompanying documentation, Presley gifts us a rousing, profound and multilayered poetic sequence.

The first volume of Frances Presley's Collected Poems, 1973 to 2004, provides an important overview of her earlier life and poetic development. She experiments with modern and postmodern poetry and prose, projects and collaborations, sometimes associated with the new British poetry. Her feminism and political commitment are sharply defined, alongside a growing concern for ecology. It includes The Sex of Art, Hula Hoop, Linocut and Somerset Letters, as well as her collaborations, with artist Irma Irsara, on women's clothing, Automatic Cross Stitch, and with poet Elizabeth James, Neither the One nor the Other. It supersedes and expands her selected poems, Paravane (2004) and Myne (2006). 'Frances Presley is a splendid and authentic poet whose work shines with exact edge and luminous presence of what she notices and chooses to translate into language' -Kathleen Fraser 'Frances Presley's writing engages with serious political concerns underscored with deeply personal experience. e world 'out there' of unrest, injustice, and conflict is not something to be compartmentalised but co-exists with the domestic on equal terms. A summer flower or childhood memory in Somerset blossoms next to the exploding horrors of Semtex. She is not a poet to shy away from life but pushes language into its face until it yelps'. -Geraldine Monk 'Presley's poems are minesweepers working below the surface to explode the breezy assumptions of Thatcherist consumer capitalism, or to explore what has already caved in'. -Meredith Quatermain

The second volume of Frances Presley's Collected Poems, 2004 to 2020, brings together a distinctive body of work, representing a major achievement in modern and postmodern poetry and prose, projects and collaborations. Feminism and political commitment are still evident, but ecology and ecopoetics are foregrounded. It includes Stone Settings and Longstones which explores Neolithic stones on Exmoor, in collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading; the playful An Alphabet for Alina, with artist Peterjon Skelt; as well Halse for Hazel, which received an Arts Council award; and the Ada Lovelace project, Ada Unseen. There is also a new sequence, Channels, on shorelines and parallel coasts. 'As these volumes attest, Frances Presley's is the poetry of the artisan, authentic in the sharpest sense of the word: rare, inventive, its original beauties edged and tempered by the traditional skills in which they germinated. Nomadic in theme, sinewy of thought, filigree in habit, this oeuvre rummages with discriminating care among the cultural-linguistic currents and debris complicating the experiencing of place, distant or proximal, prehistoric or contemporary, empty or inhabited.' -Alice Entwhistle

Black Fens Viral began in summer 2020 when I was recovering from Covid. Lockdown was lifting and I was able to travel to Norfolk on the slow train which goes through the Black Fens of East Anglia. This flat, almost hedgeless and treeless, agricultural landscape of black peat was once marshland, before the drainage of the fens. The first sluice was created by the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden in 1642 to limit the tidal flow up the Great Ouse, but he did not realise that the peat would shrink after it dried out and be blown away by the wind. We now know that it also adds to global warming through leaking carbon dioxide and means the risk of flooding is more acute than ever. I often write about landscapes I love, such as Exmoor or the north Norfolk coast, protected by national parks and nature reserves, but I needed to write about this damaged landscape, where plants are exploited and biodiversity ignored. It corresponded to the damage caused by the pandemic, a result of human incursions into wild places. Writing about the Black Fens also brought back memories of my childhood in Lincolnshire. Depopulated by mechanised agriculture, it was a lonely landscape, as well as an ecological disaster. (Frances Presley)"On the face of it, these rectangular prose-poem paragraphs seem to be 'one perfect black strip' after another, not unlike the fens themselves, but on closer inspection they too have been damaged, infected by a language virus. Both moving and funny, and operating as a kind of travel journal through the East Anglian flatlands after Covid, they are also weirdly iterative and glitchy, flickering between memorial and curative to historic ecological and economic harm - 'the illth in tilth'." -Jeff Hilson "I have been watching Black Fens Viral unfold with growing excitement as snippets have been revealed to me via message cards or more elaborate constructs of esoteric intensity. Now the completed work has been realised in this enthralling collection to add to Presley's already impressive oeuvre. Deploying the Markov text generator with a lightness of touch, words and sentences fragment, repeat and shudder as if mimicking the shivers and visual disturbances of viral fever enacted on both body and landscape. Intrusive memories of past trauma and grief flit in and out like wounded birds whilst tannoy messages on rural trains warn that COVID 19 is not the only threat we face. This monochromatic world is depicted largely in black and white or grayscale with only rare dashes of colour provided by a glimpse of blue sky, the blue of a dragonfly or the pink blush from an unseen sun." -Geraldine Monk

Avgjørende øyeblikk i mors liv er et utvalg av den engelske lyrikeren Frances Presleys dikt fra de siste ti årene. Hun vokste opp på landet og streifet mye omkring, og det å gå har hele tiden vært viktig for diktningen hennes - den underliggende fortellingen om et landskap i forandring - og for hennes poetikk; å bevege seg ut i det uoversiktlige, å grave og oppdage som en arkeolog.