Poets & Painters International

Poets from Poets Anonymous in the UK and the US have collaborated with visual artists in an exchange of inspiration, ideas and images. The UK exhibition was organised in association with the minGalleries Artists Co-operative. Below are three of the eight UK poets with their US partner artists.

There were exhibitions at Montgomery College in the US and the Croydon Clocktower, Katharine Street, Croydon June to August 2002.

Remembering - Connie Slack

contained within a landscape contained within a landscape of overflowing river and marshy fields we stand, figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope,   in a small enclosure, a hump of consecrated land, spilling the silver leaves that were my father across his father's grave, they mingle with the thin gold skins of autumn a momentary beauty in this hinterland of lead we move away - all life is remembering - a congregation of rooks gusted from puddle to puddle. Peter L.Evans

Inside In this house you can smell, when it rains, through the gaps in the frames, the cracks in the floor, the air as it moves, cool and damp, on the weeping windows. In this house in the wind joints and bones move and sing like an organ, its skeleton racked. Doors slam, and the floorboards walk weighed with invisible feet. This house in the sun stretches and yawns its wide windows and breathes in the flowers and the flies. This house we paint and patch. It wears its dressings like an old man wears new clothes, a patient bandages, uneasily. Cats like it so do mice and spiders; things that creep and grow, things that accept, live easily. We, with brisk human ways, disturb the quiet rhythm of its last live days. Orlanda Marsden

Inside - Roberta Thole

Hunted - Reid McIntyre

The Recusant Priest, the Orwell Estuary   They hunted him. The county hid its priest within the wall space, through the panneled oak. They gathered wood. They searched and never ceased Until he lay on hurdles, body broke, Dragged as God's meat, reddening the square More suited to the haggle of the farm; The Homilies' example to beware, And keep close counsel to avoid such harm. The slow stream flows swan quiet white with wings Necks arching the stern cloisters of Douai; Prayers cast on water to grow seven fold; Earth's angels' visible petitionings, Outstretching supplications through the day, The sanctity of bread grown River cold.   Alec Linstead

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