Painting the Mersey in 17 Canvases
The poems are so exact and so finely crafted, that the reader can’t help but be drawn into the world behind each poem in all its beauty and changefulness and stark honesty.
There are recurrent allusions to doubt and uncertainty, which offset the spiritual elements beautifully - that ’necessary dance’ in the final poem balancing the ‘permanence and maybe’ of the first (what a stunning phrase that is!) and ‘the distance where hope and faith exist and fail’.
It’s such a strong, necessary sequence of poems and one which I’ve no doubt will become a part of the Mersey history, because this is not just an affirmation of love for that landscape, but an important historical document too.
John Glenday
The work is very visual but holds not the image but rather the kinesthetic sense of body and soul moving through an experience, of the exchange between mind and body, body and space and the concrete world. In truth that is what the poetry holds, the exchange, not the image of but the exchange between, as it is received and filtered through the layers of prior experience, making the poems both new and distinctly of the unique moment but some how rooted in the timeless sense of having always been.
micheal wright
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The name Mersey comes from boundary: a water border, connecting and separating. Through a series of 17 ‘portraits’, poet and artist Maria Isakova Bennett connects us back to the place rivers hold, following the Mersey from Liverpool city centre to the Irish Sea. The poems are written with a fresh-paint aliveness. Like Alice Oswald’s Dart or The Wheel River Sequence you could almost stop and stand in them, walking along with each one, through their weather, tides, their times of day and viewpoints. The boat Maria sometimes works from is never at rest / wind from every direction so that, as she comes to know the river more intimately, she reaches the point where I lose all sense of me. The river’s characters and traffic feature sanderlings and lovers’ padlocks, tugboats, cargo and docks, as they interweave along the river and estuary to the open sea. Rooted in psychogeography, place and relationship these poems ‘paint’ observe and illuminate the permanence and maybe of life on and beside a river full of flow and stillness, solace, surprise and permanence; they return, again and again, to redraw a sense of place and self that, like the river, is ever-changing.