Art and Poetry: “A Wider Landscape” by Donald Wilkinson

I found the artist Donald Wilkinson because I was looking for information on poet Jacob Polley. And finding Wilkinson was like finding William Wordsworth all over again.

It’s a reminder of how poetry becomes art becomes poetry.

Polley won the T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry in 2016, for his collection Jackself. It’s an unusual collection, mostly about childhood and utilizing many of the “Jacks” of childhood as the subjects for poems – Jack Frost, Jack Sprat, Jack O’Lantern, and the house that Jack built. While writing an article on the collection for Tweetspeak Poetry, I came across a reference to a poem Polley had written for a published collection of paintings and drawings by an artist named Donald Wilkinson.

Wilkinson, like Polley, is from the north of England, the area known as Cumbria and that we often refer to as the Lake Country. (Norman Nicholson is another poet from the area, one who wrote extensively on the landscape and the environment). Wilkinson, born in 1937, trained in Carlisle and London but is directly associated with “Wordsworth country.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph of Scafell Pike Mountain in Cumbria by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.