In 2001, the artist Tess Jaray collaborated with the writer WG Sebald to produce a book of short poems and screen prints called For Years Now (Short Books, 2001). The poems are not ekphrastic as such – they existed before Sebald knew of Jaray’s art – and as with the photos in Sebald’s literary works, the images are not merely illustrative either; the poems and screen prints operate independently, but also by communicating with each other and in the expression of shared themes.
When reading the poems, I felt that a prominent theme is that of sensory deprivation. Perhaps my favourite is:
Feelings
my friend
wrote Schumann
are stars
which guide us
only under a dark sky.
In the spirit of Sebald’s recommendation to students to ‘steal as much as you can’ (Saturn’s Moons, Legenda 2011, p 150), and having been in the fortunate position of being one of his (unremarkable) students myself, I have set a few of these short poems to music, and have also adapted some of the lines slightly. In fact, his stealing idea was for people to write down ‘attractive phrases’, leave them a while and then embed them in their work with no guilt. I don’t consciously follow this rule, but instead have written a short song (just over a minute long) which I see as a condensed cover version of the following poems: ‘Please’, ‘Blue’, ‘Apparently’, ‘My love’, ‘Last night’, ‘At the last’, ‘King of the…’, ‘I Saw’, ‘Do you still’, ‘It was as if’, ‘Perhaps one day’, ‘Seven years’ and ‘Rhine Valley’. This is a tribute to WG Sebald and Tess Jaray, and attempts to capture my sense of the mood of the pieces. It is perhaps problematic to give the poems names, but each title referred to is set above the main body of the poem that follows, and therefore seems to act as a hybrid title and enjambed first line in all cases.
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