'Natures Powers and Spells': Landscape Change, John Clare and Me

'natures powers and spells': Landscape Change, John Clare and Me. By CARRY AKROYD. Peterborough: Langford Press. 2009. 167 pp. £38. Carry Akroyd's striking illustrations for two books of John Clare's poetry, The Shepherd's Calendar and The Wood is Sweet, and her design for the front cover of the John Clare Society's Newsletter, have ensured that her art is familiar to many lovers of Clare's work. But these linocuts are only a small part of her work. Her new book, 'natures powers and spells': Landscape Change, John Clare and Me, is a welcome opportunity to become familiar with pictures of tremendous variety, and great appeal. It is well titled. This collection of serigraphs, lithographs, linocuts, watercolours, and drawings, mostly inspired by Clare's poetry and the countryside that inspired him, is bewitchingly beautiful; the prints cast their own spells as much as they testify to the enthralling power of nature exerted both on the artist and on the poet. Like Clare, though with greater opportunity for travel, Carry has lived in Northamptonshire for most of her life, and like him, she has been concerned with the local landscape. Like him, too, she has despaired and raged at the desecration of the countryside caused by modern agricultural methods. She describes her book as a 'meander', in which she explains how she has been influenced by Clare and how both of them have reacted to changes in the countryside around them. The book is divided into three parts. In the first, Carry describes her discovery of John Clare's poetry and the increasing influence it has had on her art. In the second part she looks more closely at Clare's landscape/ its trees and creatures, and in the final part she extends her observations to other flat/ and indeed flatter landscapes. Quotations and whole poems are generously included in the text/ but also/ wonderfully, form part of many of the serigraphs. Looking closely to see how the words are incorporated in the pictures becomes a fascinating exercise that takes you deeper into both visual and verbal images. For those, like me, who are unfamiliar with the term 'serigraph' (another word for screenprint), Carry includes a helpful and very interesting chapter about the different methods of making pictures that she uses. Having read that/ there is then the added interest of seeing how the different techniques create different effects and how this contributes to the meaning of the pictures. Carry's first acquaintance with Clare's poetry was through 'The Crow', a few lines of which she inked over a watercolour painting 'just because I liked it' (p. 8). Although she is unable to include this picture, which is now in unknown private hands, she does include her 1996 serigraph Crow. Here/ Clare's words sail, like the bird, over the fields, woods and waters of a peaceful, blue-toned country scene. Several serigraphs follow to show the sort of work she was doing before getting drawn into Clare's world. They are about the effects of factory farming on the landscape, and despite her characteristic use of colour, which brings joy and life into the scenes, there are elements that show her concern for the brutal effects of modern machinery. No drivers are visible in her machines/· skies are grey/ dark, or troubled by clouds; a combine harvester takes up the width of one print/ advancing with huge blacked-out window, while an aeroplane streaks across the sky/ its vapour-trail cutting the darkness in half. Carry admits to ambivalence; she sees huge machines ploughing up the ridges and furrows of earlier years, hears military aeroplanes roaring overhead, feels that the native flora and fauna are being dispossessed, and confesses: 'But in a way I found myself thrilled by the brutality of it' (p. 12). Such ambivalence has inspired prints of great beauty. There is a striking serigraph called Spraying and Spying (1986] with winter trees bare against low-lying hills, dinky-toy tractors, their windows blank (unlike Clare/ who frequently includes boys or other people as part of his scene, Carry has never been keen on showing human beings in her pictures, as she freely acknowledges, p. …