A Conversation Piece: Poetry and Art
Eds Adrian Rice & Angela Reid.
The National Museums and Galleries of Northern Ireland in association with Abbey Press, 2002. 158 pp. p/b £STG 14.99 (€23)
Ills 50. ISBN 0 900761 42 3
Brian McAvera

For some strange reason poetry and the visual arts—in particular painting—are often yoked together as if they bear witness to each other by some kind of divine right. Presumably this is because both usually operate within a small compass. While it is true to say that in my experience many artists like poetry, I’ve often found the reverse to be untrue. Poets are no more likely to be interested in art than any other sector of the population. One thinks of the banalities of Seamus Heaney’s writings on art and then promptly counterpoints them with the incisive essays of a John Montague.
These thoughts are stimulated by the publication of a very attractive book which prints 50 full page colour images (49 of them paintings) from the museum collections of Northern Ireland, each one faced with a poem which, in theory, was inspired by the relevant image, and most of which were specially commissioned for the book, from Irish poets. The editors are the poet Adrian Rice who is also the editor of the co-publisher, The Abbey Press, and Angela Reid who is the Public Relations Officer of the Ulster Museum.
I suspect that the template for this book was the Tate Gallery publication With a Poet’s Eye (1986) as both of them contain 50 poems and fifty reproductions, and as the reference in the introduction to the Tate volume to Horace’s dictum ut pictura poesis [as with the painter’s work so with the poet’s] is used as a half title in the museum publication.
As a collection of poems and images this is an admirable volume, stuffed with much excellent new work, and graced by very fine reproductions. As a coffee table anthology, it is well worth buying. There is a moot point though—what is it for? This is not a carping question but rather a practical one. Teachers, for example, will find it invaluable in terms of stimulating creative writing in the classroom, for example, but in terms of any necessary relationship between poetry and art, the methodology used by the editors creates one problem, and the responses by a number of the poets create another.
What the editors did was to send reproductions to the contributing poets, so in the majority of cases the responses are not based on actual contact with the artworks. As any artist or lecturer will tell you, the experience of a reproduction is quite different from the experiencing of the actual artwork. The second problem is that quite a few of the poets simply use the image as a jumping off point for the creation of their own internal ‘artwork’ as opposed to providing a poem which explores the work in any real sense.
Most of you will probably know Auden’s poem Museé des Beaux Arts, which is a marvellous meditation on a painting by Breughel. Not only is it a highly successful poem but it also performs the splendid function of redirecting our attention to the painting and allowing us to observe one of the key elements which it is all too easy to miss—the tiny, almost unnoticed figure, of Icarus falling out of the sky.
Statistics tell us that most people rarely spend more than a minute in front of an artwork and many of us whisk past great paintings at a much faster clip. So for me, those poems that are successful in terms of the editors’ aims are the ones that illuminate the artwork by redirecting our attention, exploring elements of theme, psychology or aesthetic interest.
There are rich poems here—Brendan Kennelly on Edward Burra’s Dublin Street Scene No.1, Ruth Carr on John Luke’s The Three Dancers or Anthony Cronin on William Conor’s Riveting—to name but a few, all of which re-engage the eye as well as the mind. There are many equally fine poems such as Paula Meehan’s response to Hector McDonnell’s Bewley’s Restaurant No 2, entitled Quitting the Bars, which might be classed as speculative interpretation. Best, I think, to treat the book as an entertaining anthology rather than as an exploration of the museum collections.
Despite the quibbles (and the rather sneaky inclusion of a Heaney poem which wasn’t even written about the painting in question) this is exactly the kind of publication to be encouraged: stylishly produced, food for the eye and the mind, and cheap at the price.

Brian McAvera is a playwright, art critic and curator. His interview with the artist Neil Shawcross is on page 70 of the current issue of Irish Arts Review.

 
The Virtues of Herbs of Master Jon Gardener
Edited by E Charles Nelson
Strawberry Tree Specialist Publications, 2002: 128pp. Illustrated with twelve original watercolours.
Limited Edition, numbered copies €280.
ISBN 1-904004-02-4.
Patricia Butler

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a herbal as a ‘book containing the names and descriptions of herbs, or of plants in general, with their properties and virtues’. During the period when herbals were flourishing, they were essential in providing the physician and apothecary witha knowledge of plants used in medicine. On a domestic level, most people used the herbal in the home for looking up remedies to cope with a wide variety of ailments. It also supplied information about the correct herbs to use in the kitchen, provided remedies for such wide-ranging problems as sleeplessness, how to deal with clothes moths, how to have a ‘fayre face’ or stains for the nails.
The virtues of herbs of Master Jon Gardener is a manuscript version of a mediaeval herbal written more than six hundred years ago. Unusual for the period, it was recorded in the Anglo-Irish dialect and carries a resemblance to a number of Kildare poems of c.1300. When one reads this poem, using the modern translation, one realises that Ireland was part of a great classical European tradition, this herbal bringing together both native and exotic plants combined with herbal and medical wisdom from abroad.
Down through the centuries, Ireland was not an isolated country when it came to the study of medicine, medical treatises, herbals and gardening but formed part of the European tradition, that had been producing mediaeval herbals since the first century B.C. From earliest times, two important botanical works dominated our world. The first, the Natural History of the Elder Pliny in Latin and Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica in Greek, both of which were written in the first century A.D. Pliny’s work was a vast compilation of information largely devoted to plants of every kind whilst Dioscorides’ encyclopaedic work dealt mostly with herbs. One of the most influential early Latin herbals was that of Apuleius, a somewhat dull compilation of medical recipes which relied heavily on Greek material dating from about the year 400 A.D. The manuscript herbal of Apuleius together with Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica provided the principal sources of botanical and pharmacological knowledge during the Dark Ages in Western Europe. The earliest known herbals to reach England were probably produced in Northern France and formed the basis of an English school of botanical illustration which flourished in the 10th and 12th centuries. Gradually, this English school was superseded by elements being imported from Normandy. This ‘Romanesque’ style or Norman style of painting possessed characteristics such as symmetry and formalism which carried botanical illustration so far in the direction of abstraction that most of the plants depicted became totally unrecognisable. It is therefore reasonable to assume that in the period in which The virtues of herbs was written, scientific botanical illustration in England had reached a low ebb and this may have been one of the contributing factors as to why this manuscript herbal was not illustrated
As Professor Zettersten (University of Copenhagen) points out in his Foreword, herbals in poetic form are very special and the existence of this poem in Anglo-Irish is therefore rare and unique (Fig 3). This particular Anglo-Irish herbal exists in several versions but as Dr E Charles Nelson, (editor) makes clear it is generally agreed that the Loscombe manuscript (now in the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London) is the earliest dating from the end of the 14th or the beginning of the 15th-century. It is also accepted by scholars that the ‘The virtues of herbs’ was composed in England. A good deal of the groundwork relating to the study of this work had already been laid by Zettersten and the late Dr John Harvey, a fact which Nelson freely acknowledges.
Who was the author? It is obvious that this was no ordinary gardener but someone who possessed a genuine understanding and knowledge of plants whose cultivation is described in some detail in the poem. Perhaps a physician, apothecary or a monk, a man who had studied medicine and who used herbs that he tended in the monastery garden in order to treat the sick. Could it have been Master Jon the Gardener who was in charge of the Royal gardens at Windsor Castle and later in London at the beginning of the 14th century? And what of the scribe who so meticulously copied, goose quill in hand this poem on to vellum more than six hundred years ago, embellishing and lighting up the pages with his use of dark purples and rich reds? Again, the reader is left to speculate as his name is, sadly not recorded
Today, information relating to the history of Irish native herbs and their medicinal uses is, I suspect just a fraction of what used to exist. As a botanist and taxonomist, Nelson is well equipped to offer us some interesting observations coupled with historical background relating to Irish plants and herbal cures. This he does with rigorous authority, frequently sprinkled with humour. As he points out, in the case of the folk-cure, sometimes the remedy does not deal in specifics but rather offers such playful instructions as ‘dilute the liquid with a little whiskey’ which as Nelson comments, somewhat wryly may well have been added for personal pleasure rather than medicinal efficiency. He delights in telling us about Vervain, the ‘wizard’s herb’, a powerful remedy when coping with the Devil, a herb that can be made into a holy ointment used against demons and poisons or rue which Pliny recorded that painters and sculptors added to their food to help preserve their eyesight. The highly poisonous henbane, still seen lurking around our Norman castles and abbeys throughout eastern Ireland today, together with the annual scourge of all gardeners, groundsel are all given due consideration. Nelson’s knowledge of plant history is impressive and with information ranging from Gerard’s Herball (1597) to Geofrey Grigson Englishman’s Fl. (1955), complemented by the herbals/floras of early botanist-physicians in Ireland such as the Rev. Caleb Threlkeld Synopsis Stirpium Hibernicarum, (1726) (this was the first attempt to document the Irish flora) and John Keogh’s herbal, Botanologia Universalis Hibernica (1735), Nelson provides the reader with a rich pool of information on which to draw.
In Ireland today, we are fortunate in the wealth of original talent to be found in the field of botanical illustration and the evidence for this is clearly demonstrated in this publication. What is the basis for possessing this talent? Down through the centuries
the greatest botanical portraitists have been those who have understood plants scientifically and who possess the ability to see and describe them with the eye and the hand of the artist. He or she must possess a passion for flowers, must love what he/she is drawing and unless the artist knows the flower in all its moods, in all the stages of its development there will be something lacking in the end result. A little knowledge of botany, some elementary understanding of the structure of a plant and the functions of its various parts, is of value; the need to know why it thrives, how it keeps its enemies at bay, how it is fertilised and by what means it propagates itself are all essential elements which go to make up a successful botanical‘portrait’.
The book is complemented by the presence of twelve botanical portraits executed in both watercolour and pencil and in each case signed by the artist. Six of our most distinguished botanical artists were invited to contribute, each artist enjoying the freedom to select two plants from those mentioned in ‘The virtues of herbs’. Deborah Lambkin, Daphne Levinge (Fig 5), Raymond Piper (Fig 1), Frances Poskitt (Fig 2), Susan Sex (Fig 4) and Wendy Walsh are all represented and delight in introducing us to the diversity and intricacy of Jon Gardener’s world of plants. Needless to say, each portrait is outstanding in its own right. However, it is a pity that their work has been scanned and digitally printed as some of the richness and accuracy of colour together with fine detail has been lost in this reproduction process.
Throughout the publication, Nelson has relied on woodcuts drawn from Thomas Johnson’s edition, (1633) of Gerard’s well-known Herball (1597–98). Johnson had obtained most of the wood-blocks for the illustrations ‘from beyond the seas’. Previously, they had been used by well-known publisher, Plantin of Antwerp to illustrate books printed during the late 16th century. When one compares these woodcuts with those produced by Hans Weiditz for German herbalist, Brunfels’s famous herbal (Herbarum Vivae Eicones ‘Living portraits of plants’ which appeared earlier in
1530 (1530-1536. 3 vols), they do not appear to possess the same sense of vitality as those produced by Weiditz, a draughtsman and engraver and closely associated with Durer who succeeded in producing ‘new and lifelike illustrations’, full of naturalistic accuracy and energy, the artist accepting Nature as he found her.
This book, published by the Strawberry Tree Press, designed by Tony Moreau, bound by Bill Anderson, and produced in Ireland is a collector’s item. It has been said that the best way to keep a plant is to give it away! Unlike our plants, this is a book you will want to treasure.


Patricia Butler is an author, lecturer and critic. Her book, Irish Botanical Illustrators and Flower Painters, 2000 received the CINOA Award, Prix de la Confédération Internationale des Négociants en Oeuvres d’Art.