Holly Corfield Carr: Subsong

 

Subsong is a 15-part poem about geology and birdsong published by the National Trust in partnership with Falmouth University.

Illustrated by Antonia Glücksman, Subsong is a dream poem, taking dream to mean (as it once did in medieval English) a rowdy, outdoor kind of noise made by musicians and brawlers and birds.

 

The poem is composed from field notes and songs made for being alone, started while while exploring the coastline between Bolt Head and Bolt Tail where outcrops of serrated glittering schist are the oldest rocks in Devon and among the oldest in the South West.

 

The saw-tooth profile of the East Soar headland conjures up a birder’s sonogram, a picture of sound where the frequencies are split into scribbly layers, the darkest of which — the fundamental — records the note we hear (or we think we hear) while, almost inaudibly, the voice is splitting at vertical intervals into harmonics.

 

Just as schist means ‘to split’, these are poems for two voices, both of them yours, written to be read aloud to yourself, a slow sing-a-long accompaniment for being outdoors.

Holly's book is multimedia, combining poems, 'field notes' and songs creates a lyrical journey through landscape and a tasteful celebration of nature using the tactility of words and perfectly complimented illustrations depicting a similar quality of awareness and telluric sensitivity.

I love the ethereal nature of Glücksman's cyanotype print illustrations, bringing an extra quality not only to the words on the page but the overall look of the book as well. The imagery is, as mentioned, the perfect compliment to sensitive word play and poetic descriptions that are based upon observation and content uncertainty, not assuredness and fact. 

https://hollycorfieldcarr.co.uk/otw-portfolio/subsong/