How I came to marry poems and paintings

During lockdown, I began to explore my husband’s collection of the art books which filled his shelves and which I had never previously paid much attention to. I came to realise that there might be a poem in some of the paintings, particularly but not exclusively those which caught so vividly a significant moment in time, frozen in an eternal present on the canvas yet laden with rich implications from both the past and the future. Many seemed to me to cry out for imaginative interpretation – and so I began to write.

My method during the months of lockdown was to flick through a book of reproductions, settle on a promising image, look earnestly at all the detail, which became imprinted on my mind’s eye, then go for a walk and let the initial ideas swirl and settle. On my return, I would write very quickly, read aloud the first version to my ever-patient and thoughtful husband, and then make adjustments.

After Iockdown, I sought out a few of the originals in London galleries. It was a great pleasure to see, for example, Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergère, Paul Nash’s Dead Sea and Wright’s The Experiment with the Air Pump. I had carried the paintings in my head – and now here they were in all their vivid immediacy!

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