This is a tale you can read three ways. The first time through, it's the story of a woman who takes one glance at conventional early-twentieth-century life, and throws in her lot with art instead.
The second time, you might ask yourself if this woman is based on any particular artist of the inter-war period, and you'd be right to wonder - though this is no work of scholarly biography. A line connects the historical to the here-and-now, but it's feathered and soft.
Third time reading, find the point where memoir and imagination connect. Now you can look.
About the Author :
Julia Bird is a poet and poetry programmer. Her poetry collections Hannah and the Monk (2008) and Twenty-four Seven Blossom (2013) were published by Salt Publishing, and the illustrated pamphlet Now You Can Look (2017) by The Emma Press. With Mike Sims, she published the poetry and artist’s book Paper Trail (Blown Rose, 2019) and A Joy Forever: a walk out with John Keats (Paekakariki Press, 2021). Anna Vaivare is an illustrator and architect who lives in Rīga, Latvia. She has illustrated two children’s books and was awarded the Jānis Baltvilks Prize for Book Art for her work in Forage for Porridge (Liels un mazs, 2015), a collection of poems for children by Leons Briedis. She also draws comic strips. You can find more of her work on her
website: www.annavaivare.lv
Review :
'Beginning with her childhood and taking us on a sensory and emotive journey through adolescence and onwards to her role as a wife and mother, Julia’s poems sparkle with wit, intrigue and richly captivating imagery. '
- Caitlin Miller, Irisi Magazine
"In such images, Bird’s poetry shows how artwork is not separate to everyday life, but entwined with it – and, moreover, bound up with its transience: in these poems, omelettes, snowmen, marrows are all short-lived moments of artistic beauty. " - Jonathan Taylor, Everybody's Reviewing
"This deftly composed poem sequence, paired with Anna Vaivare’s vibrant illustrations, moves through the life of a female artist during the early part of the twentieth century. Beginning from age nine, towards and past the point where the unnamed artist has a child of her own, Now You Can Look has a sharp, immediate quality which pulls you firmly into a life which both did and did not exist – vanished, imagined, or perhaps something else." PBS Bulletin
