Drawings From A Sculptor’s Landscape

Sarah-Clare Conlon

Rocks over rooks

circling below, squawking above

the parallelogram of a copse:

windswept firs leaning —

trunks   trees   tops   teetering.

Winds form an image, like hands a sculpture.

Here at Hangingstone, geometry is geology,

“the roads contours over a sculpture,”

said Hepworth, “The hills sculptures.”

The hills, the heights, the hollows, the heaps,

“the whole of this Yorkshire background.”

Chunks of gritstone worked on over time,

think natural erosion, manmade damage,

hammer-and-chiselled words and codes,

names and addresses, Cow and Calf

carved, flanks scarred,

scraped, scratched,

sculpted. Nothing

stays the same, people

move on, places too.

A plane passes over

and the light goes out

briefly, an ice age

in a second or so.

Sarah-Clare Conlon is a writer, editor and Manchester Open artist. The inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Manchester’s Victoria Baths 2019-21, she is Apprentice Poet in Residence for Ilkley Literature Festival 2022. Contraband Books publish her debut poetry pamphlet cache-cache in September 2022; debut prose chapbook Marine Drive follows with Broken Sleep Books.