White Queen’s Last Stand, Sally Festing

Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2021    £6.50

Writing about looking at everything

This pamphlet starts with an epigraph:

A work of art can create no greater effect than when it transmits the emotions that raged in the creator to the listener [viewer], in such a way that they also rage and storm in him, said composer Arnold Schoenberg.

For me, the fascinating thing is how the poems here show us that storm in the poet. The preface provides enough of Richier’s biography to helpfully frame the work. But it also talks about Festing’s life and the similarities between Richier’s childhood landscape and her own: ‘I swam in her sea and felt at home’.

The first poem (‘The vine-grower’s daughter’) brings together Festing’s childhood beach memories with her imagining of Richier’s:

Four siblings, rough-footed,
smelling of garlic, made plaited tracks
down wide grey shores.
                 ‘Plus vite, Maine!
Our youngest looks at everything.’

[…]

Every day with all our gear,
and several times
when the water bottle was left behind,
I took a barefoot run
on mud-cracked hexagons.

Those great underfoot details of the plaited footprints and dried mud hexagons show us the poet as Richier’s equivalent, looking at everything even as a child.

Reading as a poet myself, it’s particularly interesting to me when Festing puts herself into the mind of Richier as artist, as in ‘Women aren’t made for art’:

École des Beaux Arts
remembering what her father said,
she enrolled. And she grew strong

on possibility, a rearing horse, lit with light

Or in ‘War’:

but the Valais region
         roused her
to create strange hybrids,
darn space
              with armatures.

[…]

Challenged by the spoiled,
the humanoid, to grasp
necessary art
                      and fix her figures
in other people’s eyes

Or in ‘The world of form’:

The Paris spring
                       flickered.
The part of her head with a horse in it
                                                        galloped.

The last poem, ‘Queen’, ends appropriately with a nod that brings together Richier’s art and this pamphlet’s tribute to her: ‘You refuse to be unsung’.

Ramona Herdman

The world of form

Brimming with enthusiasm, information, quotes, and references, this is a pamphlet formatted unlike others. ‘She strove to honour what she loved’, and ‘The part of her head with a horse in it / galloped’ says Festing in a poem titled ‘The World of Form’.

The publication celebrates the life and work of Germaine Richier, a major figure of twentieth-century sculpture, whom Festing feels has not been given adequate recognition. The preface is a one-page essay linking Richier and Festing through landscape, gender, and art. The supporting text and poems themselves, switch between the poet and her subject. A sequence of twenty-five poems follows, each creating its own form, often by the use of white space and creative line-breaks.

‘Form is secreted by process [. . .] Form is secreted by experience’, says improvisational musician Stephen Nachmanovitch in a footnote

but the Valais region
           roused her
to create strange hybrids
darn space
               with armatures.

    [‘War’]

After the poems comes a ‘Timeline’ — a four-page essay on Richier and sculpture — and finally a page of ‘Notes’, which is in effect a booklist of further reading.

‘We must have the courage of our peculiarities’, says Marianne Moore, according to another footnote. In this pamphlet where format is interesting and different, Festing strives to honour what she loves and ends the final poem with, ‘You refuse to be unsung’.

Peter Wallis

The work in progress: celebrating the creative process

‘Art […] suggests something beyond itself. We cannot be finished with it.’ This note underneath one of Festing’s poems captures her attitude towards the creative process — it is something constantly ongoing and of great creative value. It is not finished products with which Festing is concerned, but the process of creation itself.

White Queen’s Last Stand explores the life and art of French sculptor, Germaine Richier. Throughout the pamphlet Festing explores Richier’s creative process. In ‘Check But Not Mate’, Festing details how Richier created her sculpture Chessboard (Grande):

Grappling with cancer,
what could she do

but burn like driftwood
brilliantly.

Brooding on her chessmen—
Rook, Knight, Fool, King, Queen,

She built life-size simulacrums
gave them gesture.

Underneath the poem is a note detailing Festing’s own creative process: ‘On another visit to the Tate, I stood in front of Chessboard (Grande) with a plain sheet of paper fixed to a plastic folder. Moving around the sculptures, I made pencil sketches of them.’ Indeed, Festing uses notes and diary extracts under many of the poems here. Underneath ‘L’Atelier D’Antoine Bourdelle’, for example, Festing notes: ‘Form is secreted by process, like our bodies. Form is secreted by experience, says improvisational musician Stephen Nachmanovitch.’

This is poetry as biography, and the footnotes mean it’s also a work of autobiography, with Festing detailing her thinking and how she went about writing her poems. In ‘L’Atelier’, Festing describes Richier’s workshop as ‘her belly, her womb, / where young are conceived and grown.’

In a note under ‘The Couple’, Festing references John Cage who ‘said that he was not interested in art as self-expression but as self-alteration’. By making visible both Richier’s creative process and her own, Festing reveals the creative process as an act of self-creation and self-assertion. This is a fascinating pamphlet, which offers a glimpse into the creative life-force of not just Germaine Richier but also Sally Festing herself.

Isabelle Thompson

When poet and subject merge

This pamphlet is in homage to the sculptor, Germaine Richier, her life and work. In the first poem ‘The Vine-Grower’s Daughter’ a strange synthesis is created between poet and sculptor. The girl Germaine Richier is on a beach in the Midi with her family:

She cut runes in the sand —
   ‘des étangs’, littoral lines.
   Drew circles with a stick.
        It's what kids do.
              What I did too, laying down bones

   beside the slate blue sea

Suddenly there is a young Sally Festing on a Norfolk beach and later:

I took a barefoot run
on mud-cracked hexagons.

The days were long.
        There was so much,
        so much time. 

The last two lines of this poem are Richier again but really by now the two girls / women seem one:

        Look! I made a perfect sun.
She balled her fists, signed GERMAINE.

What an amazing beginning to the pamphlet.

I felt myself propelled into the artistic life of the sculptor, who appeared before me, it seemed, as if there was no filter. A rhythm is created, there is urgency: life events, the war years and always the work seen as a battle. In ‘L’Atelier’, the sculptor is at work. The poet speaks of her with complete authority:

This is her world with her figures.
It varies — she laughs. Despairs.

When the hole in her gut feels small
and the sun shines in, she gives them buddings.

When the hurricane whistles through,
she knows what it’s like and punctures.

The sculpture of the White Queen has a hole pierced through it. These are the last lines of the final poem, ‘Queen’:

You count your beads   carry on   dodging the thistles
rattling chains to Poseidon   You refuse to be unsung

Sally Festing’s poems are spare, precise and elegant, lots of white space, sometimes indented lines. Richier is quoted as saying that sculpture ‘renounces a solid full form. Holes and perforations light up the material, which becomes organic and open.’  

Anne Bailey