By CD Boyland

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One of the more striking projects collected in Jeremy Deller’s recent “children’s book for adults” is ‘Father and Son’ – for which grey life-size candles of Rupert Murdoch and son Lachlan, posed “in acquiescence to the tradition of corporate portraiture”, were installed in a church in suburban Melbourne, set alight and burned.

Over time, the melting wax transforms the images, hollowing out their skulls and leaving Lachlan, in particular, seeming to cry “molten tears of wax, for a lost kingdom or a worthless inheritance”.

The salience of this work lies in the tension it contains, between the monolithic, imperial power of the media mogul and the transient nature of the candle and its wax remains. Candles being, existentially, physical embodiments of temporality. As well as giving light, their purpose is to remind us – tempus fugit.

Candle Poems – written by Greg Thomas and published by Astra Papachristodolou’s imprint Poem Atlas is a collection of colourful photo-poems or photos of colourful poem-candles, which wrestles with multiple, similar tensions.

At least three of these are between: the 2D page’s ability to communicate the physical aspects of 3D objects; the innate animus of candles (which are, fundamentally, devices not objects, designed to burn and radiate heat and light) and the passive, unlit or unburnt state in which they [mostly] appear here; and the fact that a candle’s burning happens only once, during a fixed and unrepeatable period of time, while these candles as photographed remain in an enduring, almost-limbo state on the page, untethered from time and its passing.

A fourth such, which operates at a remove from the physical objects that are the subject of the 66 or so full-colour photographs comprising this collection, is the deliberate and/or contrived semiotic tension between words, ‘words as signifiers’ and meaning constructed through unorthodox language-use – specifically (in a number of instances here), where language is used to create intentional oppositions, contraindications, forking paths of meaning and thought development, or to play games.

Other examples of Thomas’ practice of colliding words and meanings on the page can be found in threshholds – an earlier, but essentially parallel collection of more traditionally typographical concrete poetry. In threshholds, away from any thought of candle’iness, Thomas’ poem-forms operate as sharp little bursts of ludic word-sense, exploding with, often simultaneous, resonance and dissonance.

Similar kinds of language use are, fundamentally, also the ‘content’ of this book and – while it’s the sometimes the case that the candles which give physical embodiment to the poems are more secondary, conceptual shells or containers for Thomas’ texts – in others, candle as object, and language as meaning join together in satisfying concert – wholes that are impactfully greater than the sum of their separate parts.

‘Contrails’ plays wittily with the diagonally printed word, the object (a line of exhaust gases crossing the sky) and the planet-signifying orb of blue candle, while ‘whalefall (after Mhairi Killin)’ tilts the ‘F’ in ‘fall’ to simulate the angled back of a leaping cetacean, and ‘sinkingairrises’ (one of a number of ‘circle poems’) makes smart use of the ability that a circular 3D form has to turn – thus moving the text through time (the time taken to turn) and meaning (the turn from ‘sinking’ to ‘rises’) – creating an effect that would be impossible to replicate on a plain, flat page.

Candle Poems asks to be treated not just as word-play but as something else/more/other. There is an extent to which this book is also part-exhibition catalogue – the objects photographed for its pages were exhibited in Dunoon-Moca, a studio and gallery space run by Alastair Noble and Kathy Bruce, which specialises in text, visual poetry and book arts – and it remains the case that an encounter with these candles IRL, in full-colour, 3D, physical form would constitute the fullest, most complete experience of their waxen whimsicality.

In the meantime while Candle Poems remains, in terms of its empirical self,  a book – and, therefore, an object containing flat, digitally reproduced depictions of other objects. That said, it is a book which tries to resist readings of its content as ‘just’ a collection of subjective images/signifiers – photographic ‘shadows’ cast by, rather than the objects themselves.

Candle Poems succeeds best when it leans into, or interrogates tensions between the 2D and the 3D. The photographed hands which occasionally intervene to generate a sense of movement (for example, in ‘exile lexis (islands sinking, islands rising)’) are the very definition of ‘manipulative’, foregrounding the physicality of the objects depicted and their existence (somewhere) in the world as three-dimensional, embodied forms.

Elsewhere, ‘beam loon moon (prism poem)’ digitally superimposes images to manifest multiple text[s] simultaneously, delivering onto the 2D page a realisation of the 3D truth – that words on the different faces of an object exist (and, therefore, are communicating meaning) regardless of which side ‘faces’ the viewer. Multiple-viewpoints are possible, this poem says – more than one thing can be said, at any one time. 

All this said, there was probably still scope for the poems in this book to do more with the essential candle’iness of their subject/objects. As mentioned earlier, candles are devices. Their purpose and essential animus is to burn. An unlit candle is passive, only becoming active with the introduction of a naked flame. With only three exceptions, these candles are quiescent, unburning – the equivalent of light-bulbs awaiting electricity.  

This deprives us of the opportunity to witness another aspect of a candle’s physical nature – which is that it melts. Here, we should think back to Deller’s ‘Father and Son’ and recognise that an integral part of that work’s operation in the world, and in the sight and minds of its audience was the tension between the image/object melting, sublimating to the jouissance of fire – and the seemingly impervious and malign resilience of Murdochian dynastic power. 

This comparison has its limits, of course. Thomas neither intends nor includes the sort of polemical meta-commentary implicit in Deller’s work – and his poems operate more happily because of this, with many of them dedicated to friends and counterparts/colleagues.

But there’s still a little yearning, a little ‘what if?’ left at the end of Candle Poems which would have been satisfied by more play with the plasticity of these objects, some dialogue between their passive and active states – between the object[ive] that is ‘to melt together’ or ‘melt away’ and its equivalent referential language-signifiers, or even an exploration of the scope they offer to embody and express the destruction of language and meaning by fire.

Fire, and the idea of burning illuminate the final tension inherent in Candle Poems, which is between unrepeatable (and, therefore, ‘lost’) moments in time and their preservation (or freezing) as images on the page. At the end of the book, the poem-candle/candle-poem ‘old thresh (for Matthew)’ makes a second appearance – this time lit and burning, half-buried in a bed of dead leaves.

As well as calling back to the title of threshholds – and the sense that imparts of ending by stepping over or across a boundary between states – this near-final image accomplishes two quite contradictory things simultaneously – it creates a sense of winding-forward, re-starting the passage of time by envisioning the end to which all of these candles may ultimately be (may already have been?) put – whilst through its essential, 2D properties (a flat page, within a physical object) it re-states and underlines the extent to which the same candles are preserved in defiance of time, in the pages of this book.

At its end, Candle Poems delivers a moment, in which its poetic charge is heightened – and this happens, semi-paradoxically, not through the action of text, language and meaning, or even their interaction with the physical reality of Thomas’ many colourful candles – but through the juxtaposition of this image with the images that precede it.

Since its first coining by Eugenio Miccini, the term ‘visual poetry’ can be understood to refer to the use of images to perform poetic operations on the semantic plane. However far the work in Candle Poems journeys into/negotiates with the physical/3D, candlelit world, it remains in its essence a book of images-made-poetry/poems-made-images – bright, colourful, illuminating poem/images, with the power to charm and, sometimes, delight.

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