Here at Two Ponies, we’re excited to announce the launch of our first illustrated chapbook, “The Quiet Year” by Laura Allen. Laura is a resident of Seattle, Washington, and is a working visual artist as well as a poet; her energetic, surreal oil collages are featured throughout the thirty-six pages of poetry and original artwork. (Visit her website here.)
Allen says, “The ongoing dialogue between visual art and poetry has always fascinated and challenged me.
Sometimes poems come from my visceral response to an artwork, but this time, the artwork itself was originally done as a response to a poem: Hilda Doolittle’s short lyric, ‘Cities.’ They seemed to really resonate with this series of poems, many of which are focused on cities, and human incarnation in general.”
“The Quiet Year” goes on sale in May.
Below is the opening poem, “Yes.”
Yes
All week long we heard the muttering under the leafless ashes.
The less seen the better, it seems. Shall we start again
the blind egg hunt, the search for one last haunted closet?
(A red cut tomato lies on a plate, its halves
somehow redder for having been whole.)
Our ears know, our whiskers. We feel the heart’s many tongues
lapping at nothing, something, nothing. All our thoughts have bells on,
the kind that keep us up at night with a tiny constant tinkling:
if we could, we’d whisper to them
yes, dear, we hear it coming too….
The Quiet Year by Laura Allen (Two Ponies Press 2017) is a trip into a collage world where oil and print images intermingle creating angelic centaurs of air and fire; bringing to life mythologies as old as time, transforming the everyday into prayer. Laura’s lovely poems offer insight, inscrutable and evocative, while her images taunt with deeper mystery. The pairing makes both picture and poem all the more wonderous and will leave you happily lost in a collage world of words.