Their Silence a Language

So the old snake sheds its skins. Clash of flint with flint that waves hurl against chalk. Risings, sinkings: cycle on cycle. Fresh water, salt water, brackish lagoon. Whirl and loop of streaming gravel. Cloud on cloud of sediment. Yaldhurst: the tilled fields. This collection is the outcome of a creative collaboration between the poet Jeremy Hooker and the sculptor Lee Grandjean. The work originated from Hooker's lifelong knowledge of the New Forest in the south of England and Grandjean's powerful tree images. The book creates a strong sense of the presence of the Forest, but is concerned primarily to realize an imaginative vision that involves new relationships, especially between man and nature. It comprises photographs of sculpture, two woodcuts and unique drawings specifically designed around the text of the sequence of poems, as well as an essay by Hooker on the collaboration, and extracts from his explorations of the Forest in prose.