MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2022
Link to MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE’s website
And across all the distances of man and woman, of the one and the many, drawn on surfaces and hidden on skin, distances that make even intimacy, the distances circulating between us of past and future, of presence and loss and birth, I felt the bright golden arms of life and hope.
Timothy Mathews,
from different parts of the book
from different parts of the book
There and Not Here: Chronicles of Art and Loss is a collection of poetic essays written in response to works of art. These range from film, novels and installations, and include Pedro Almodóvar, William Kentridge, and Barbara Hepworth, as well as William Shakespeare and Diego Velásquez. The book explores strength of feeling, especially grief, as a path to communication, to an understanding of what unites and divides, and ultimately offers its own path to a constellation of engagements with life.
Each of these pieces came to life because of being arrested by an artwork, stopped in my tracks and rooted to the floor, and being impelled to write about it. They were moments of certainty but not suddenness: part of being overwhelmed is not knowing why, trying to find out why—for better or worse. Writing turned into chronicling these long moments. Long moments of loss as well, and trauma. Chronicles began to accumulate, finding a place that doesn’t immediately emerge: a meeting of something made, someone writing, someone listening. I was looking for ways to breathe within those distances. Maybe loss, and grief, can fashion a community without imposing it. Maybe.
This book is simultaneously an enactment of vulnerability and resilience, conveyed through the candidness of personal witness and through the tenacity of its imaginative power. I know of no other contemporary work in which such emotional transparency, analytical agility and sheer writerly skill are more convincingly and movingly combined.
Rod Mengham,
from his Foreword to the book
There and Not Here is a series of careful, tender, brutal meditations on grief and a life spent thinking about art. It steadily invites the reader to attend to everything—from Shakespeare’s Pericles to Matisse’s cut-outs—and encourages us to wonder what to say in the face of loss and absence, how to think, how to be. It is about that most significant and elusive of things: how to be present with art, with the world, with the other.
Jenn Ashworth
John Kinsella
The full text can be read
on the blog Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist
on the blog Mutually Said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist
As a lecturer and researcher in the field of creative writing, There and Not Here. Chronicles of Art and Loss is a book I recommend widely to colleagues and Higher Degree by Research candidates. The creative-critical praxis Mathews demonstrates is one from which we can learn valuable techniques, particularly for research degree candidates seeking heartfelt approaches to exegetal writing.
In a voice of humble vulnerability, Mathews show how the act of responding to art can become its own artistic offering. As I opened There and Not Here. Chronicles of Art and Loss, I began opening myself to potentials of reading beyond any I have known before, which will change everything I will ever read again.
All this, because of grief… All that jazz, inspired by grief… All this, beyond grief… All this, and grief… All this, because I love you.
A verbal-visual dialogue between Timothy Mathews and Caroline Bergvall, each responding to the other’s There and Not Here and Alisoun Sings (Nightboat Books, 2019), can be seen in the September 2022 issue of Site-Reading Writing Quarterly, a site that celebrates reading and writing as situated practices.
Tim’s response to Caroline’s bawdy visceral Alisoun is to push through melancholy to freedom, adopting the ritornello, a baroque musical form that figures a return; while Caroline’s visual phrases scripted in response to Tim’s writing on loss, blur and drip with sadness and energy.
Jane Rendell