In this ongoing series, we publish an original poem, written in response to a work of contemporary art. This month, poet Ella Frears chose Volcano Snake Sun, September (2024) by Charlie Prodger.
Charlie Prodger’s pencil-and pastel works-on-paper have, on their surface, a pleasing tranquillity. In Volcano Snake Sun, September (2024), for example, nature postcards are line-up neatly on a shelf, basking in a crossthatch of window-pane shadows and dappled light. Look closer and drama lies within: a snowy mountain-cap but a rocky peak breaking apart; a snake, coiled back and violent. These drawings marked a shift away (at least for now) from the more conceptual work which won the artist the Turner Prize; in their quietness, Ella Frears finds worlds we recognise as our own.
Volcano Snake Sun, September
after Charlie Prodger
Smoking hot mountain. Snake on the defensive.
What is it I’m holding here?
The sun, though. The shadows of traffic
pulsating across a borrowed bedroom wall.
Having observed me wandering a country garden,
a well-known poet points out that I keep my hands
in my pockets the whole time.
You have to touch a garden, she says.
How can you know a flower, if you haven’t lifted
its head and gazed into its face?
I watch a group of elderly women feel up a wanton
clump of fennel. Every shiny frond shivering bronze.
I’m ashamed to be caught prim and separate:
a topiary duck in the picturesque.
I want so badly to be the man who
swims butterfly in my local pool. The way he troubles
the waters, untroubled.
I live for the wake. I am a device.
A woman in the workshop believes in ‘The Power
of Eye Contact’. Her face hovers close to my face.
She’s locked on my eyes. She moves wherever they go.
She’s so like a cobra.
Ella Frears is a poet based in London. She’s the author of Shine, Darling (2020), shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Goodlord (2024), a hybrid work which takes the form of one long email to an estate agent, also shortlisted for the Forward Prize. She hosts chat and music show Tears for Frears on Soho Radio.
