Review; Tina Negus. The Other Side.

On the other side

A book of poetry and Pictures by Tina Negus

              This is a remarkable book by a very special woman. Tina is not just a poet, but a painter, photographer, potter, naturalist and historian. She is also the best person anyone could turn to for support in a personal crisis. Her poem-picture art is not just words and marks on the surface of paper, it runs deep, deep into history, deep into human experience, deep into the meaning of life.

            She has chosen the title of one of her poems for the title of the book. In it she looks through a key hole into the life of a church, where the life of the place has turned into history.  Perhaps she is telling us that she has stepped outside of time to observe the passing of time. Perhaps she is telling us that she is on the side of the ghosts, or in an eternal space. Yet again, perhaps the mystery is about a faith that is lost.

            In “Gospel writer”, she says,”

                       Living words pour from my pen

                       As life ebbs from me

            Who is the gospel writer? Is it the lark rising, singing his song to the sun? Is this a pagan Goddess? Is this the author, bringing us good tidings, or is it someone who can no longer see him, concentrating only on her pen, her words?

            The poems take us back to the remotest of times, when the landscape was made by nature and then remade by man. In so many of them we go off into the long dead past, only to find it still with us, accompanying our steps as we wander with the author through the ruins of now.

            When Tina and I started the on-line gallery, Poetry and Pictures England, on Flickr, I had dreamed of large coffee table books with fine colour pictures opposite each image. Indigo Dreams publishing have offered us a slim volume, A5, with tiny black and white pictures tucked away below the poems. It is a poetry publishing house, after all. Maybe coffee table books will return if the economy ever recovers. My own book, “A journey though Grief” is given a similar treatment in its paper back form, but at least there is a colour version in the e-book (Chipmunka publishing.). Some of her pictures come out surprisingly well in black and white. Langstrothdale works particularly well.

            Love of history, love of the English landscape, love of mythic reality and naturalistic spirituality, these are the themes which are woven in threads though the great majority of the works. Occasionally she makes a foray into the grime of modern life and modern politics, but here she is not as convincing, not as connected. The modern ugliness of life impinges on her work occasionally, when she shows and tells of the violation of the temple at Avebury by unknown modern vandals.

            Three more poems to mention; “Dunstanburgh” tells the story of a castle on the coast where Kings and Lords are imagined coming and going, only to replaced by the poet coast path walker, calling out to the birds and the winds, where once there were armies. The tiny black and white image looks pixelated, a sad comment on the grandeur of the grand place the poem conjures. “Zipped” has a powerful resonance with me. I have heard that zip run over the bodies of my wife and father.

“Ziiiiiiiiiiiippppppppp

Echoing quiet, softly

My mother’s life being zipped up”

It is an unforgettable noise, an unforgettable moment. The poem tells it so well.

Finally there is the last poem, the one after “The other side.” “To one end only” tells of the end of life, the end to which we are all coming. It feels to me a very biographical story of the author’s own movement into old age and dying. Perhaps there is no other side after all. Perhaps there is no stepping out of time.

You will need to read the book to make up your own mind.

Nick Owen                                              2012-10-21