In response to the La Dame à la licorne tapestries and Anni Albers’s On Weaving, Campbell has created a stunning sequence of prose poems which elicit from the reader a tactile response. I found myself running my fingers along the floral borders of each text, with my eyes drawn simultaneously to the repetition of the names of flowers and the prose poems enclosed within the borders of the “millefleur”. Contemplative, lyrical and innovative, Enclosures is a pamphlet that demands to be read, touched and heard; in the words of the poet herself, “deep inside your ear time begins to sprout”. – Mary Jean Chan
Richly scented with hyacinths and wood violets, the poems in Susie Campbell’s Enclosures are also deeply tactile. Picking up the threads of textile artists such as Anni Albers, Campbell’s prose poems engage intricately with the sixteenth-century La Dame à la licorne tapestries in Paris, transforming their scarlet and golden hues into words which bristle on the page. Campbell ‘translates’ the tapestries’ millefleur background into a dense verbal garden of plant names which enclose her square poems, querying how a tapestry might be read as a text, and how a text might thread a history of weaving in words. These lush poems will ‘sting your senses awake’. – Suzannah V. Evans
In Enclosures, Susie Campbell has crafted such a rich and sensual tapestry of language. Physically and textually restricted – by the page edges, by the rectangular word-frame of each poem portrait – this collection continually expands beyond its bounds, ‘fraying’ into questions, wonderings, yearnings for the wildness of touch, the sting of earth, looping into contemplations on gender, ecological destruction, divinity. Meshing subject, poet and reader by addressing all as ‘you’, they travel through time and space, drawing the thread of narrative from the codes and hierarchies of the fifteenth century to our present ‘enclosed’ times. The lush but spare shuttle of words takes us from the ‘millefleur’ border of wildflower names, through the central panel of each sense-themed poem, out again into the surround: back and forth, inner to outer. These are poems of intricacy and intimacy. Each reading brings new bright discoveries and textures. – Caroline Harris
Enclosures was written with a tapestry needle that plunges in and out of weft, of traditional craft, plant stems, flower heads, and language. It is a work that continually moves through, cuts, and ties together the language and tradition of textile craft.’- E.P Jenkins
SOLD OUT
Edition of 100 numbered copies. *
ISBN: 978-1-3999-0263-2
Each copy will come with a limited edition Enclosures promotional bookmark or a handprinted ‘OSMOSIS’ bookmark. **
Susie Campbell is currently researching Gertrude Stein, prose poetry, and spatial form for a practice-based poetry PhD at Oxford Brookes University. Her poetry has appeared in magazines, anthologies, and visual poetry exhibitions. Her other poetry books include The Bitters (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), The Frock Enquiry (Annexe, 2015), ‘I return to you’ (Sampson Low, 2019), and Tenter (Guillemot Press, 2020). She can be found at susiecampbellwrites.wordpress.com and @susiecampbell on Twitter
* once stock has been sold, any further purchases will be refunded.
** specific bookmark requests can be made prior to purchase. Multiple bookmark designs can be purchased at £1 each.
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