I encountered the boats on the cover of Far Country in Soul on Deck, a story in Image Magazine about their creator Jake Lever and his series of installations called “Soul Boats.” It was love at first sight. I tore the page with the fleet of Bardsey Boats out and pinned it over my desk. They became a beacon as I wrote and re-wrote this book.
As letters “written” in symbolic language, these boats seem to me not so much image as an invocation, a means of engagement, a mode of travel. For how else can one reach the distant lands promised in the title Far Country? Particularly given that they aren’t exactly places one can reach in ordinary ways.
My draw to the image was strengthened by Jake’s description of the process behind their creation, as described in the Image Magazine story:
I love this example of art making via deep engagement with place and its inherent mythologies, a process of seeing, exploring, collecting, shaping, marking, sharing. What beautiful instructions for artists working in any medium. It makes me wonder, how can my poems engage directly and tangibly with the place they arise from? What is it they might offer to others, or back to the land? What can they listen for in the silence? Where might they travel?
As you can see, I was deeply struck by Bardsey Boats, a response that doesn’t surprise their creator. In a recent email, Jake wrote to me,
“Simple pre-industrial boat forms seem to get “under the door” and seep into the soul like no other image. There is something primal around the vessel cradling/nurture/protecting at birth and yet offering safe passage across the threshold from life into death. All very mysterious, primal and wonderful – beyond intellect and more to do with intuition, ancestors and spirit life. They have given me so much and I am still learning from them.”
Boat as imagination, as consciousness, as body. These are the things that carry us across the deep waters of life. These boats helped me to recognize the ways in which this book is about loss, change, and grief on many levels–the transformations we face in our individual lives, the large scale ecological shifts taking place around us, and the collective atrocities and unraveling we are amidst.
Perhaps the boats are keys, or symbols that open the way. Adorning a book cover, they become the door that is literally opened. Given how much time the speaker in many of these poems spends looking for doors and keys, that is fortuitous indeed.
Visually, the Bardsey Boats appear to me as a poem—perhaps each is word in a gloriously spare poem, or a stanza made of thin couplets descending down the page. Or perhaps each one is an individual poem, and they are a sequence in which the image shape shifts and transforms.
Most of all, I love the reversal of this image—to imagine each of the poems in Far Country becoming a boat. A vessel, a fleet of vessels like these inked and gilded bits of driftwood.
May they, too, carry the reader between worlds.
::
Kyce Bello 
Gorgeous. Perhaps one of my favorite poems