Well 60 Lovers to Make and Do came out, and we had a great time launching it at the charismatic Cinema Museum, which occupies the site of Lambeths former workhouse, and still maintains an atmosphere in which the word poetry is allowed to blink out like imaginary dodgy neon from the word poverty.
I impulsively printed myself 4 metres of gold satin with collages from the book, at 3rd Rail screen printing studio in Peckham.
My good friend and former studio neighbour, incredible dress designer and maker, Linda Brooker, cut from it enough to make this dress, and trim it with red pompoms for good measure.
Photo by Andrea Reece
The book contains 65 poems in which women create their own lovers from things they find lying around at home or at work. These are accompanied by collages in which hidden lovers are cut from unlikely and unpeopled pages from magazines or broken books. When I’ve read from the book people seem to find it funny.
Who knows, perhaps they recognise something about the absurdity of love and relationship. The wildness of our projections… Could this make the book quite a nice present for the lover who doesn’t even know that it’s poetry they love? Just saying.
You can get hold of a copy direct from the publishers here: https://www.henninghamfamilypress.co.uk/product/60-lovers-to-make-and-do/, or please order it from your local bookshop. It’s already being stocked by one of my personal favourites, the Bookartbookshop near Old Street tube, as well as Herne Hill Books. Also, soon it will be available at The Second Shelf in Soho, and Circus in Brixton Market.
Cut out lettering for book cover (but not actual book cover.) First cover rough
One of my favourite things to do on holiday is to drift about in secondhand bookshops.
Single author collections (alphabetical! detail!)
There’s often good contemporary poetry in charity shops which is heartening and disheartening at the same time, great for fixing holes in my spookily well organised poetry book case though.
Other books I collect are often more elusive, being older, usually early and mid twentieth century publications, fairy tales and activity books.
A few from my fairy tale collections collection
Old activity books, with their dry yet perky instructions for practical creativity also speak of magic and transformation, with a resourceful kind of innocence.
some of my wonderful 20th century activity books
The combined inspiration of these three types of book is behind my new collection of poems that’s about to go to press.
Called 60 Lovers To Make and Do, it is a sequence of poems in which women characters create their own lovers from stuff they find lying about at home or at work. The sixty women all have different jobs which give the poems their titles, and sometimes the lovers they manifest connect with these.
A sneak preview of a few of the poems from 60 Lovers to Make and Do
It’s a homage to the female artist in all of us, as well as to the imagination and to loneliness.
I was delighted that David and Ping Henningham, of Henningham Family Press, wanted to publish the sequence, as they are artists like me, and always design their books as if each one is a new invention.
I have been making a new type of collage/papercut to accompany the poems, but not illustrate them. For these I have been concentrating on finding and releasing invisible lovers from pages in old magazines and books.
Lovers in a minimal interiorverily a floating knave
There are also images made with collaged words in addition to the salvaged images – some works with just found words and no image, there’s even a bit of drawing.
Mystery female hat prop collage
Working with the Henninghams has been brilliant, they helped think of how to structure the book – suggesting a seasonal approach, like a book of hours.
We all spent a day in the V and A looking in the library as well as at the collection, riffing off the many exquisite and surprising objects, and marvelling at how medieval people made pages with so many dimensions, what we could take from their inventive text handling…
I cut out another type of newspaper collage for the seasonal dividers – here’s an example of one: winter.
Winter lovers cut from mourners
This picture is cut from a newspaper photo of the crowds of mourners at George V’s funeral in 1936.
Henningham Family Press ran a very successful Kickstarter campaign to supplement some Arts Council funding for the book, which means there can be really beautiful duotone reproductions of the collages, as well as an additional colour within its pages. I’d like to thank Gemma Seltzer at Kickstarter, and everyone who supported the book, and preordered a copy through this.
If you would like to order a copy of the book, it will be easy to buy direct from henninghamfamilypress.co.uk from September, as well as by ordering it at your local bookshop. Do please come to the launch party –
Tuesday 17th September at the Cinema Museum 6:30-9, with a reading at 8.
hopefully there’ll be enough room for lots of us, even with our real or imaginary friends and lovers.
spilling the ink with Sophie Herxheimer 