NEW  PUBLICATION:

let me show you a ripple

when words are a way of seeing

    Let me show you a ripple is a new publication by the Tasmanian artist, Dr Kristen Lang.

It is a book of photographs. It is also a book of poems. Words and images rub and weave together. The effect is alluring.

   Startling for its honesty and for its exposure of things-up-close, life's fabrics and small patterns, its essential conditions and simple joys, the book breaks the surface of our normal routines. It offers time, the time of poetry, in which small qualities are allowed to take over, to unravel, to be breathed in and considered. The act is one, also, of celebration.

   There are difficulties and uncertainties in our lives, the book acknowledges, but there is also beauty, intimacy, joy. There is confusion, but there is also hope. Full of balance and energy, the book is seductive and consistent in its capacity to provoke and delight.

          "Her work is reflective yet humorous,

                 immediate yet questing”.

                                                     Jill Jones, poet

        The collection “makes us look at the world anew.

   Lang’s poems and photographs show an assured

              and original talent at work.”

                                      Dr David McCooey, poet

        "Kristen Lang is a young poet of astonishing intelligence and outstanding lyrical warmth. …when I think of what she has already achieved and of what she will achieve I experience a beautiful moment of quietness: she is a gift to the world, and we need her. She has shown me a ripple in a way that makes me realise I’ve never wholly seen one before."

                                        Peter Bishop, Creative Director, Varuna - The Writers' House

   Taken largely in northwest Tasmania, the photographs reveal a view most often missed. Each image offers fine detail, frozen textures, from river surfaces, ice crystals, tangled leaves, a drop of ocean, and the like. Beauty resides in the smallest of things. The poems, too, reveal a microcosm. Here, the details and textures are of thoughts and feelings, but the intent is the same. And the passion is just as obvious. Clarity and vitality emerge as part of an encounter that is visually, rhythmically and emotionally engaging.

from Let Me Show You A Ripple:

                                                       insomnia
 

                                                       there’s a black and white cow in the next-door field;
                                                       she’s up all night: 27 916 chews.

     Narcissus

     In the water he could glimpse
     another life,

     himself in another skin –
     he called it his own.

     When asked how he was, he would reply,
     “Let me show you a ripple”

     and he would explain how
     sometimes he saw trees

     speaking words into starlight; once
     he felt a rock shiver against his side.

     But no-one responds. No reply
     bends through his own reflection.

     So he stays by the river, and he stays alone,
     gazing into the water.
 

                                                        Postcard

                                                        John cuts the embroidery in the portrait of his life, staring into
                                                       stretched beige – he says there are patterns where the threads were,
                                                       and he’s sure he’s seen, through one of the holes, a distant light.

                    Faith

                    Seeds erupt from the air’s pores,
                    caught in teasing winds, like hooped skirts

                    twirling over open fields.
                    I climb, touching nothing,

                    floating over charged ground, a small figure
                    lost in the wind’s arms. The sky

                    finds its way
                    through the limits of my fingers.

                                                                         The dinner party

                                                                         four of us, and the taste of common gestures,
                                                                         the whiff, even, of Roman wine; what a crowd.

   flow

I arrive home while she sleeps; the day
peels from where it lingers on my skin

and in the half-warmth of our bed,
I feel her heat steal over me:

like sliding through the outline of my own name,
lifting to where she slumbers.

I let her go, “wife”, “lover”, “woman”,
and we are cheekbones and quiet breath,

a melt of ribs, ever rising. In the morning,
we rescue words

from the shores
of night-time’s flow.

Kristen was born in Melbourne. She now lives near Sheffield, Tasmania. Her poems have been published widely in journals around Australia and on Radio National.

Kristen is currently involved in charity work in Nepal, helping to educate the very poor in the hope that their families can break the poverty cycle in which they are trapped. She returns to Australia at the end of the year - watch this space!

Books can be ordered here, by phone on 03 64911283, or by writing to RIPPLE, PO Box 259, Sheffield, Tasmania, 7306, Australia.