Each month, TATE ETC. publishes new poetry by leading poets such as John Burnside, Moniza Alvi, Adam Thorpe, Alice Oswald and David Harsent who respond to works from the Tate Collection. Subscribe to the Poem of the Month RSS feed.
This April Lawrence Sail presents his poem based on Bridget Riley’s Metamorphosis, on display at Tate Britain from March 2006 – February 2007.
Considering Bridget Riley’s Metamorphosis
Here it is, in black and white –
the optic nerve seduced into playing
a blinder. Pressures out of sight
mill all images back to
latency,
the mind’s series, treacherous and true.
Yet definitions are at their sharpest
when speeding towards the point
where disks
of silver and black throng to the mesh
of something like judgement, then a remix
of tried perceptions, making them new –
as, say, the image
of holes in a colander
themselves drained away; or a swarming stream
of fish-eggs; or a geometer’s world
of ciphers somehow unhooked from time,
an eternity made of in betweens.
Now you don’t see it, now you don’t –
the invisible ink which you know is there,
the oxygen of desire, which can’t
be denied; that gasp of mortal love,
or
the momentary gift of all its meanings.
Bridget Riley
Metamorphosis 1964
© Bridget Riley2007
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Lawrence Sail has published nine collections of poems, most recently Eye-Baby (Bloodaxe Boooks, 2006). In 2005 Enitharmon Press published a book of his essays, Cross-currents. He has edited a number of anthologies, including First and Always: Poems for Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital (Faber, 1988) and, with Kevin Crossley-Holland, The New Exeter Book of Riddles (Enitharmon, 1999) and Light Unlocked (Enitharmon, 2005). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Metamorphosis, on display at Tate Britain from March 2006 – February 2007, as part of an exhibition of works from the British contemporary art collection belonging to the José de Azeredo Perdigão Modern Art Centre (CAMJAP), part of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Previous poems
October 2007 Will Eaves presents his poem Crater
September 2007 Francesca Beard presents her poem Portrait of A Young Child In Blue at Tate Britain
August 2007 Ilka Scobie presents her poem based on Hélio Oiticica’s Grand Nucleus
July 2007 Pelé Cox presents her poem based on Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss
June 2007 Jacob Polley presents his poem based on Nicholas Hilliard’s Queen Elizabeth I
May 2007 Penelope Shuttle presents her poem based on Barbara Hepworth’s Garden Sculpture (Model for Meridian)
April 2007: Lawrence Sail presents his poem based on Bridget Riley’s Metamorphosis
March 2007: Tishani Doshi presents her poem based on Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Woman
February 2007: Anne Rouse presents her poem based on Andreas Gursky's 99 Cent, 1999
January 2007: Moniza Alvi's poem on Samuel Palmer's Coming From Evening Church 1830
December 2006: David Harsent's
poem based on Jean Dubuffet’s Le Arbres de Fluides 1950,
and Susan Hiller’s After the Freud Museum 1991-96
November 2006: John Burnside's poem on John Nash's The Cornfield 1918
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