Reviewed by Ce Rosenow
Noble Scratch, Roughly Spoken
by Brad Winter and Laura Winter
As If Press, 2024, 60 pages
Limited edition: 150 copies numbered
Order from the authors at [email protected].
Finally! That was my response when I learned Brad and Laura were collaborating on a book. I’ve known the Winters since the mid-90s, and I’ve followed their creative endeavors and their support of other artists for decades. Brad’s artwork––including collage, drawing, frame-making, painting, and print––is bold and original. Laura’s poetry is a musical instrument creating meaning as it carries the reader on rhythms, sounds, and silences. It has been powerfully paired with live music, photography, and translation in collaborative projects. Laura has championed the work of many artists by editing and publishing TAKE OUT, a bag-a-zine that collects art, music, and poetry in each bag. Brad and Laura also worked for years with the Creative Music Guild, curating performances by musicians from all over the world. Yet this couple never co-created a book until now.
Noble Scratch, Roughly Spoken presents twenty-five drawings by Brad and twenty-five poems by Laura. Excepting Brad’s drawing on the first page and Laura’s poem on the final page, their work is paired on opposing pages.
Brad shares drawings printed in their original size from his ROUGHBOOK journals. They are filled with energetic lines and varieties of shading, feeling at times irreverent and playful, and often populated with shapes suggesting human or other-worldly figures and their environs. Brad’s artist’s statement in The Inflectionist Review describes his drawings as abstract and immediate, the result of process turned loose in an automatic/free manner—creating space/s made new with each successive adventure. His drawing, first thought, best thought, is the perfect piece with which to begin this book. It suggests a beginning and creates the initial step in the reader’s journey, igniting the collection’s energy, and preparing the reader for the series of adventures created in tandem with Laura’s poetry.
Laura includes a range of poems written over the last two decades. Their subjects represent her interests during that period, including the natural world, her engagement with other poets and artists, and challenging social issues such as homelessness and climate change. At times, she combines two of these subjects in a single poem. In “For Han Bennink,” Laura employs several of the characteristics that are hallmarks of her poetry.
waving grasses
on the polder
birds
flying out of the wind
winter branches
writing
on
the
sky
The title references Dutch musician, Han Bennink, and many of Laura’s poems address her connection to other artists and writers. Bennink is known in part for the free improvisation in his music, and the poem formally enacts that improvisation. Laura begins the poem indented from the left margin and includes varieties of spacing between words and lines. This variation both visually mirrors the movement of the natural imagery––waving grasses and birds/flying out of the wind, ––and the unique movements Bennink creates in his music. The metaphor of branches as a kind of writing on the sky and its visual representation on the page completes the poem’s enactment of the shared improvisational approach to art, whether through music or poetry. Of course, Brad’s drawing on the facing page, shabby bird calls foul, offers its own reference to a bird and Brad’s motion-filled, improvisational approach to drawing.
In fact, the book’s organization into alternating pages of drawings and poems suggests relationships between the work of both Winters. Another example is Laura’s poem, “A Dream of Salvation,” which addresses increased temperatures and fire, houses burning, and the greed that allows such devastation to continue. It concludes with the lines waving money/smudged with ash. Brad’s drawing, tidepool, on the opposite page has markings at the top that could be construed as falling ash, and the tidepool itself can be an indicator of climate change.
These relationships are satisfying, but the greater impact is the energy created between Brad’s artwork and Laura’s poems. Each “text” draws the reader through the contents of one page and launches them onto the next, offering hints of connections throughout. For the complete experience, read the book multiple times. Experience the pace when reading beginning to end. Then spend time focusing on the movement and subject matter of each individual piece. Finally, take another look at what happens between the page before and the page after, whether facing or not, to see what might be discovered. Nobel Scratch, Roughly Spoken is a dynamic collection that rewards readers with each new look.
Reviewer Bio:
Ce Rosenow’s poetry books and chapbooks include The Backs of Angels, Even If, North Lake, Pacific, A Year Longer, and Spectral Forms. She is one of the eight authors of Beyond Within: A Collection of Rengay and co-editor with Bob Arnold of The Next One Thousand Years, The Selected Poems of Cid Corman. She is also the author of Lenard D. Moore and African American Haiku: Merging Traditions and co-author with Maurice Hamington of Care Ethics and Poetry.