Here Tony Curtis writes 24 poems to celebrate great women writers from now back to Sappho 2600 years ago, and Liam Blake finds places of beauty, then observes the sky and listens to weather forecasts so as to return to capture a perfect cast of light. Dr Pat Meere, co-author of Geology of Ireland: A Field Guide *, described to me these rocks at Garretstown and Garrylucas, as “gorgeous rocks and a marrying of aesthetics and geology”. Science and art can both be a fullness and an enhancement of the other and these poems and images balance within a space where knowledge is both present and optional.
The rocks which we see in this book are located on the coast 4 km to the northwest of the Old Head of Kinsale in County Cork. They started life some 330 million year ago as muds, silts and fine sands that were washed down from great mountain ranges mainly to the north into a shallow, gradually deepening, coastal sea. Within this sea we can imagine small drifting and free-swimming organisms, such as goniotites, which were shelled relatives of the present day octopus, squid and Nautilus, and whose fossilised shells can now be seen within some of these rocks. Although we age these rocks as some 330 million years old we can think of them as old as the beginning of this planet some 4.5 billion years ago since they are composed of the detritus of eroded earlier lands, which in turn were composed of even earlier lands.
Photography © Liam Blake
Poetry Tony Curtis
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