Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9.9 x 26cm, 2pp, a colour photograph of the fields around Little Sparta by Pia Maria Simig. The image is overlaid with the title "THE FLUTED LAND" which comes originally from German literature (which Pia would know well). The quotation refers to the undulation of the fields, the ploughing of the earth but also to the music Pan would play in a mythical arcadian land. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
6.2 x 19.7cm, 4pp, black on white card with light blue and green abstract drawing by Stephen Duncalf. Internally Finlay has the words "WESTERN APPROACHES"
The drawing seems to be of a highly abstract side of a battleship painted in the dazzle style which was a form of camouflage during the battle of the Atlantic. Such ships would sail east to west as escorts - approaching Britain with conveys bringing supplies. VG+
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
6.5 x 7.5cm, 4pp, black on grey card with a text:
Emblem
"Tallies - slips bearing the names of fishing boats and placed on top of their boxed catch - are all mechanically printed, except one to which the name has been added in an unselfconscious hand." then there is a box with a reproduced handwritten name "PLOUGH" in it. Below is
Luke 9:62.
Finlay has quoted that biblical passage before - it means to be optimistic and not look back. The handwritten tally may indicate that someone could not afford printing but it is left "unsubconscious"ly amidst the more expensive tallies. Additionally the name Plough reminds one of the Christian metaphor of fishing for men but with Finlay's often equivalence of farming the land and the sea. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9.5 x 15cm, 4pp, black on brown card with a text:
Emblem
A boat carrying a much-patched sail, the patches of varied sizes, shapes and colours. The blade of the rudder, where it is visible is also patched."
Variety in unity.
Finlay enjoys the way something is constructed in components to make the whole more than the sum of the parts. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9.5 x 15cm, 4pp, black on blue card with a text:
Emblem
After the bow, (a very long way after) and after the mast and the tabernacle, and the hatch, and the wheelhouse, and the thwart, and the sternpost, comes finally the rudder, which (all else being in order), gives direction to the boat."
First and last
The rudder is both first and last - first because of its importance to the boat's passage, and last physically. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
9.5 x 15cm, 1pp, black on bright red artist's card with an appropriated drawing of a Japanese suicide aircraft, and a text:
Many, many things
They bring to mind -
Cherry blossoms
A translation of a poem from the Japanese by Donald Keene which here Finlay associates with the Japanese MXY7 Ohka (Cherry Blossom) rocket-propelled suicide aircraft used near the end of the war in the Pacific. In Japan cherry blossoms are an enduring metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life - which of course is more true of kamikaze pilots than most. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, n.d. (1999) 10 1 x 14cm, 1pp. Artist's postcard black on blue with a text taken from Mixed fragments by Novalis in which the post sees similarities between metaphysical romance and the adoption of a pen name. VG+. . ...
Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, n.d. (1999) 8.2 x 9.5 cm, 2pp artist's card black on blue with a text that Finlay has used on several occasions on the front: FOR "HARVESTER" READ "GLEANER" on the reverse the two boat numbers PD98 and CN 444 are reproduced along with the title EU Erratum. The original boat's name was changed from Harvester to Gleaner when Britain joined the European Union. VG+. ...
Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
6.5 x 10cm, 4pp, black on white artist's card on opening one sees a drawing by Jennie Spiers of an upturned boat in a forest and opposite there is a Finlay haiku;
The upturned boat's
snowdrift
soldiers on.
The shape of the boat the wrong way up clearly reminds Finlay of how snow clumps in heaps. And what is more, Finlay knows how to write a classical format of Haiku with the middle word "cutting" the meaning of the scene. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
8 x 9cm, 4pp, black on white card with a linocut by Jo Hincks of sheep in a glade. Inside is a poem by Finlay:
Sheep Folded, Shadows Unfolded
Shoreham
The sheep are home, and the dark is coming - the shadows are "unfolded". Shoreham is a city that famously has plastic sheep as a public artwork. VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
14.4 x 10cm, 2pp, black on white artist's card. The drawing by Gary Hincks is of a memorial "grave" stone for Henry Vaughan which can be found in the Little Sparta garden. There is a Pilcrow (¶) at the top of the marker which Finlay explains the poet used in place of a title when certain poems were to be regarded as elegies. Clearly this visual poem is also an elegy for Vaughan.VG+.
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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
6.3 x 12.1cm, 4pp, black on rippled blue/white artist's card. The one line poem inside reads:
Morning: the mountains lifting off the mist
A more common saying would be that the mist is lifting off the mountains but by this reversal Finlay is suggesting the early morning scene of misty mountains gives an illusion of the hills being pulled above the clouds. VG+.
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