Still Book

Simon Armitage has been commissioned by 14-18 NOW: WW1 Centenary Art Commissions, Norfolk & Norwich Festival and Writers Centre Norwich to write a sequence of poems in response to 26 panoramic photographs of battlefields associated with the Battle of the Somme chosen from archives at Imperial War Museum, London. The Somme Offensive took place on the Western Front between July and November 1916, and is considered to be one of the bloodiest in British military history. Armitage has written thirty poems of between two and 20 lines that are versions of The Georgics by the Roman poet Virgil. Paired with black-and-white images that are a hundred years old, the contemporary words meld with the visual devastations of war to haunting effect.There are many thousands of aerial and reconnaissance photographs of the First World War that offer an unfamiliar and rarely-seen visual perspective of the conflict. Map-like images of cratered fields and hieroglyphic trench patterns; dreamlike obliques showing landscapes of sepia-toned towns and ghostly villages; panoramas of apparently tranquil meadows and country lanes that disguise more macabre details. These photographs will form a physical and atmospheric backdrop to poems that explore events and locations significant to the Somme Offensive. The result is a dialogue between military documents of the day and the poetic responses they provoke one hundred years later. Simon ArmitageDesigned by Praline Design Studio and published by Enitharmon Press and the Imperial War Museums, Still is an 74pp large-scale landscape publication with introductory texts, contemporary maps, fold-outs and decorated endpapers. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name that opens at East Gallery in Norwich on 10 May as part of Norfolk & Norwich Festival 2016, which is the first venue in a national tour.Read More