Julie Brook - artist - films

Passeggiata by Julie Brook

films of Julie Brook working

Drift by Caroline Bergvall

I missed this by an hour recently on a poetry pilgrimage to London.

There is a printed, written poem, plus a voice plus musical performance. I can't find a complete recording or video of that. Short portions of the audio are available.

Blog piece on the whole poem.

Link with 2 short audios.

Hearing what I can of it makes me realise how I have taken in the cold, sea smashed nature of our life here in the north of Europe. The wind, rain, gales, shipping forecasts, fear for those in heaving ferries... the whole horror of the sea. Yet my intense longing to be near it, to smell the air, have the salty skin which comes from spending days sailing. Those rocks and pebbles, cold sand, little patterns we make in the sand to channel the water down via our own little river way to the edge of the beach. The endless destruction and shifting from the waves. Wonderful and fearsome, unalterable, terrifying.

Nostalgic for the Sea

'On the bridge, a warm competent calm prevails....From here the icebergs ahead look like a jumbled barrier, as if there were no way through, but the radar shows otherwise. I like to look at the radar screen, and I like to watch the ship's captain and officers as they consult it...The officers move calmly between window and radar, radar and window, studying now one, now the other, checking one against the other, determining a course. In an alcove behind the bridge, screened at night by curtains, is the desk where the charts lie, with compasses and pencils, under an angle-poise lamp; a digital readout gives the ship's latitudes and longitude, as transmitted by satellite. It's quiet on the bridge, like a public library, but for the constant faint reassuring drone of the heating or ventilation.'

From the essay 'Aurora' in 'Sightlines' a books of essays by Kathleen Jamie, published 2012, by Sort Of Books.