With In the Temple we might begin with ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, as this small, beautifully produced book is a collaboration between artist Catherine Bagnall and poet L. Jane Sayle. Visual art, like poetry, is something made, and Bagnall’s paintings—in ink and watercolour—are performances that draw our attention to their technique as well as their subject matter. Though these paintings only occasionally bear an obvious relation to the poems they appear alongside, they are wonderfully apposite in their tone and colour palette. Scratchy, comic, moody, affecting and childlike, they remind me a little of Quentin Blake’s collaborations with Roald Dahl, and a little also of E.H. Shepard’s with A.A. Milne. Sayle’s poems are brief, haiku-like in their distillations of a moment, sometimes unmoored in time, as in the strikingly beautiful ‘The Strait’:
What to make of the confusing clouds
over the long-ago bay
this morning?
The misty mountains
are not that far behind them
But what of all the years
and the cold unpredictable sea between
This poem’s description is plaintive, infused with wonder, the adjectives (‘confusing’, ‘misty’, ‘unpredictable’) conveying the speaker’s bafflement. Distances contract and expand, the way time does in memory. The temporal shifts (‘long-ago’, ‘this morning’) aren’t really shifts at all but collapses: ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past,’ as T.S. Eliot has it. The compression (and expansion) is remarkable, and the poem’s insight is integral to its observation, not separable from it.
Read the full review at Landfall Online here.
