House of Water by Janet Lees
Author : Janet Lees
Format : Softback, 21cm x 14.9cm
Illustrated by Janet Lees
Pages 60
Publication Date 10th May 2019
Publisher :Lily Publications on behalf of Janet Lees
More than fifty per cent of the human body is made up of water; in babies this is closer to seventy per cent, the same as the earth itself. For the poet and artist Janet Lees, water is the element in which she is most at home. In this full colour collection of image and poem pairings, water is never far away – in the ebb and flow of love and loss, joy and sorrow, pain and elation. Immersive, otherworldly, sometimes deeply moving, these works are praise songs to the forces which, when we feel them, we feel them with our elemental selves.
Janet Lees is a poet and artist based in the Isle of Man. In 2018 she was the artist representing the island at the Festival Interceltique in Lorient, France, with an exhibition of art photography, poetry and film. Her poetry has been widely published in journals and anthologies around the world, and her film-based works selected for many international prizes and festivals. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Lancaster, and a BA Hons in Creative Arts from Manchester Metropolitan University. This is her first book.
‘Such a beautiful book. Janet Lees’s work has a timeless tone which can be as devastating as it is spellbinding.’ – Beth Orton
‘In House of Water, Janet Lees offers a complex conversation between poetry and photographs that navigates those contested, permeable topographies where the tangible touches numinous. On this shifting shore, vivid images reflect dislocations in both outer and inner space, laying bare a sometimes savagely beautiful excavation of one’s apprehension of the world. ‘What is treasure and what is trash’? As these fragments drawn up from ‘the bottom of the deep blue sea,’ ‘the river’s disinterested murk,’ and the raw edges of experience demonstrate time and again, all is treasure in the reflected light of the House of water.’ – Oz Hardwick