A simple rain, with Vivienne Glance

A collaboration of art and poetic texts with Vivienne Glance.

Poet, playwright and performer Vivienne Glance and visual artist Perdita Phillips have collaborated on a book which began on a very cold, windy day with Perdy walking all over the terminal moraine of the Athabsca Glacier in the Rocky Mountains, Alberta, Canada, mesmerise by rocks. Vivienne responded through poetic text to a series of Perdita’s photographs of these rocks found on the moraine field below the glacier, and of the timeless open spaces of the mountains. Geology, geography and the imprint of deep history resonate in this collaboration to create a personality for this landscape. The poetry emerges not only from the visual realm but from the human emotional realm relating to the scale of the place, both in time and its physical presence and its subtle beauty.

Photography with an eye for symbolism and hint of narrative, prose filled with visual acuity and flurries and flakes of inventiveness. There is a tangible synergy here between text and image, giving rise to “dissolved aspirations”, depth…past mourning” and the “notes of ages”. ‘A simple rain’ is a book to linger over, a book to savour.

Kevin Gillam (award-winning poet)

Glance’s poetry and Phillips’s images – spiritually intelligent, spacious and honest responses to this austere and shapely northern wilderness, and to each other’s work – teach us how to see again, less simply but more clearly: into our own and each other’s hearts and into the architecture of this world of places.

Mark Tredinnick (author and poet, winner Montreal Poetry Prize)

Reviews:

Fellowship of Australian Writers. 2012. WA. Fellowship News, June: 3.

WritingWA. 2012. ‘WritingWA recommends… A Simple Rain.’ The West Australian, May 29, Today 7.

‘Together, Vivienne Glance’s abstract, evocative short poems and Perdita Phillips’ equally evocative photographs create a shifting, unfolding narrative of the connection between place and mind. Images and words speak of to each other in this gorgeous book, suggesting sets of ideas which extend beyond its covers.’