Dulwich poet Kate Miller is one of four writers up for an award in the poetry category of this year’s Costa Book Awards.
An art historian and picture restorer by training Miller published her first collection The Observances in April 2015. The Costa Award website describes the book;
‘The collection as its title suggests intertwines practices of watchfulness and remembrance. The poems follow an urge to locate in language, however tentatively, elements of a world that change or fade‘.
Miller says ‘art is often part of my work’ and the cover she chose for the book is a detail of Neither Warm nor Cold (2013) by contemporary painter Christopher Le Brun. Miller mentions ‘I recently spent time at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Whilst I was there I was particularly struck by The Triumph of David by Nicholas Poussin. I spent a lot of time looking, drawing and writing in front of it’.
The Triumph of David by Nicolas Poussin
c.1631 Oil on canvas DPG236 By Permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery
Out of that inspiring trip grew an interest in the work of another French painter, Leon Cogniet who is now remembered most as a teacher, becoming Professor of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1863. Cogniet lived almost 200 years after the 17th Century painter Poussin but Miller sees parallels between their work. She wrote a poem inspired by The artist in his room at the Villa Medici, Rome (1817) which currently belongs to The Cleveland Museum of Art. This is a self-portrait depicting the younger artist when he was in Italy studying for the prestigious Prix de Rome.
Miller says ‘in my poem he writes to his beloved sister about his first few weeks in the city, excited by the sculptural qualities of ordinary folk seen moving through architectural space in the strong light - you get this from Poussin very strongly too. Its particularly amazing when you consider how they worked in studios without artificial light.’
Against This Light
You ask me, Marie-Amélie, am I the youth
who said goodbye last month?
To answer you
I’ll paint myself against this light, immersed in
your first words from home, tempered in the blaze of blue
and gold that is an April sky in Rome.
In my high-ceilinged room the window opens
on a crinkled map of roofs and parapets.
Swallows clip the sill. In their bright air
I thrive.
I ache to think of you – confined,
the Cast Room stove not lit since Easter,
among the plaster limbs the master favours – frozen
forms I’ve left behind.
Everything I see
if I go down to watch the market in the Campo
moves: knives and scales flash at fish stalls
decked with lemons, to the thrum of forge and stable,
fresh stone-dust loads loaves and cheeses, and a girl
in carmine slips into the shade beyond a column,
out of the flap of sun-bleached linen.
I own I’ve fallen
more than half in love with Romans. Young or old,
they hold themselves as proud as any figure in a frieze.
I’m hungry for the way a woman turns her head,
the telling language of a trader’s hand.
Alive or carved, they’re definite and grand,
even in the shadows of an alley, warm.
The line a girl in carmine slips into the shade beyond a column, is a direct reference to a detail of the Poussin painting where a female figure flits behind a stone pillar in the top left hand corner.
The Costa Book Award finalists will be announced on 4th January and the book of the year on 26th January.
