Review: Bordering on Miraculous
Reviewed by: Linda Herrick
Authors:
Lynley Edmeades and Saskia Leek
Publisher:
Massey University Press
ISBN:
9781991151131
Date Published:
12 May 2022
Pages:
96
Format:
Hardback
RRP:
$45.00
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How soothing to shrug off the grind of domestic life by slipping away into the pages of Bordering On Miraculous, a lovely soft dreamy art-poetry partnership by Saskia Leek and Lynley Edmeades which gently elevates ... domestic life.
Bordering On Miraculous, number four in the Korero “picture books for adults” series edited by Lloyd Jones, has set a high bar since its launch in 2019 with High Wire, a collaboration between Jones and artist Euan Macleod. The mission statement is worth repeating, to invite “new and exciting collaborations for two different kinds of artistic intelligence to work away at a shared topic.”
Since that debut, once a year, like a birthday, Massey University Press has also published Shining Land: Looking For Robyn Hyde, with writer Paula Morris and photographer Haru Sameshima, and The Lobster’s Tale, by writer Chris Price and photographer Bruce Foster. In each one, the marriage of text and image stirs a rare, deep emotional connection, inviting repeat visits.
The design of each book in the series is also integral to its appeal, thanks to Gary Stewart of The Gas Project. Slightly smaller than an A4 notebook, the books are hardcover, with a linen spine, solid pages stitched together with thread and plenty of air on the pages. They are beautiful to look at and to hold.
Both covers of Bordering On Miraculous broadcast (quietly) the Leek-Edmeades delights within. The front cover painting features a bright yellow ragged-edged orb with a stronger eye at the centre surrounded by blue borders. The back, a clock face set at five past four, features an Edmeades poem which does not accompany the same image inside. The front and back endpapers glow with the colour of sunflowers.
The partnership, originally pairing Leek with Bill Manhire, changed after the first Covid lockdown. With Landfall editor Edmeades on board, the concept shifted from “Stories of Miraculous Cures” to small miracles to be savoured “within everyday domestic life” (the background to the project is on MUP’s website).
The collaborative engagement of art and words between the two women, both based in Dunedin, feels fluid and relaxed, a reflection of their friendship. Edmeades had a baby shortly after the work began and you can feel it on every page: sleep-deprivation, joy, disorientation, the vulnerability of being a new mother and the new, bleary focus on very small things in the house and out through the windows as she nursed her child and changed nappies at all hours.
Certain objects recur - bananas (very useful for their immediacy), toast, mugs, cups, tiles, eggs. The world often seems upside down. ‘Borders’ seem important. One of the first poems – they don’t have titles – faces a painting of a window, with green curtains parted to show a bird outside flapping across the blue sky:
“Look at all the little things: the little socks
the little fingers: the little reward of doing
the settling: of getting the baby to sleep
so we can do the other things: he sleeps:
we wait for him to wake: he wakes: we curse.”
Meanwhile, the housework is going to hell and an unhelpful visitor appears:
“Putting her dirty cup on the dusty windowsill
she inquires again if you sleep with the baby in the bed.
But rather than ask, she instructs, with a slight
inflection, a hint of question to disguise her disgust:
you don’t sleep with the baby in the bed, do you?
And: you don’t have family in town, do you?”
We all know what she is saying. Across the page, Leek’s image shows a cup on a windowsill, presumably dusty. Further along, opposite a swirl of orange and dotted slashes of green and pink, the new mother is looking at the floor where the baby has been playing:
“Things such as they are, it has been a very ordinary day. Beds
remain unmade and no colour has appeared in the sky. From
inside, the trappings of activity smear themselves across a very
dirty floor, threatening to leak out towards the border. Broken bits
of a lamp that were pulled from the socket yesterday lie on the
windowsill. This is my life now, you think.”
But all is well, a miracle, really, as Leek and Edmeades stretch towards the final pages and the image on the front cover, the circle:
“Goodbye circle,” Edmeades opens, as she breast-feeds her son:
“Goodbye to a future
Without this
Big head
In it.”
What a remarkable process of expansion and adaptation presented by this conversation between friends. Quiet, modest, tender and a little fearful, it ends with a short verse facing an image of a window, a pair of yellow curtains framing a puff of clouds:
“Here we are listening
to the hyphenated sound
of clouds and it is
miraculous.”
I’m not sure what that means but I’m going to think about it.
Reviewed by Linda Herrick
