crystal and clay
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Ice crystalizes, vaporizes. Clay disintegrates, joins the river. The deepening cold, the pressure of water on compressed earth write stories of crystallization and movement, flows, ecological processes. Language is formed in the translation -- the spaces -- between water and ice, ice and water, water and vapour. Through erosion, this is a poetics not of erasure but translation, transition, process. The words form, deform, reform, never static, no claims made: a world of verbs. Continual exchange. Multivocal depositions. A shifting, silting conversation.
geo: earth, graphy: writing
Language crystalizes; becomes vapour. Letters join ice, ice deposits on letters. My words shrink into mud and sediment. Language erodes. Meaning de-composes. I have nothing to offer the river but my disintegration. Twenty-six letters become shorthand for all I cannot say, or see, translate or understand in the language of botany, geology, the loss written in rapidly changing weather and water levels, the limits of language, the incapacity of my colonial English to apprehend what is written by the land. I seek something beyond anthropomorphism, hope for the possibility of something shared, beyond consumption. What new poetics might I hear from the river that might shape me, translate into a relational geography, a different kind of earth writing.
crystal and clay is out of print from The Blasted Tree Store
Featured by The Blasted Tree: August 16, 2020
sophie anne edwards
Contributing Author
crystal and clay is a Blasted Tree original selection of durational/multimedia ecopoems belonging to a larger series, Interview with a River, a Canada Council of the Arts-funded project by sophie anne edwards
Edition of 100 numbered photo booklets published in Canada