"Lamp Black and Blazing" is a series of drawings created in response to a collection of poem. Both poems and drawings are presented together in this book.

The textual works contained in the book are poems written over the last four years. They have been growing as a collection under the title “Lamp Black and Blazing”, from the poem “Lamp Black”. Words arrive at the edge of sleep, “Where the Souls Night Comes Pouring in”; they are quiet as owl feathers on the hunt and equally unforeseen. The Souls Night is Lamp Black and without light. From this both reassuring and terrifying darkness, the soul has the capacity to blaze with all the actual light it has absorbed and all the secondary, shared light it must also absorb.

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​Each poem is accompanied by a drawing, a visual response to the images that flow between text and mark. Most of the drawings are an extrapolation of a line from a poem and a photocopied page from my sketchbooks; pages where the poems also began their lives. Where once only the proximity of pages connected text to mark, now in these drawings something more intentional is formulated.