The Idea of Islands

by Sue Hubbard and Donald Teskey.

Set in a wild, remote landscape, on the west coast of Ireland, Cill Rialaig is a pre-ramine village that clings to at steep slope 300 feet above the sea on the old road that leads to Bólus Head. The restored stone cottages of the village, which now support residencies for visiting artists, are about as far west as you can go in Europe without falling off. From this rugged coast the island rock of Skellig Michael is visible, some eight miles out into the Atlantic, where pre-Augustinian monks once built their beehive huts. This is a landscape permeated with history and memories. It was here that the poet Sue Hubbard and the painter Donald Teskey met and initiated a collaboration that resulted in this book.

The Idea of Islands comprises a suite of fifteen emotionally incisive poems by Sue Hubbard and eleven powerfully atmospheric drawings by Donald Teskey RHA.

Responding to her experiences of Cill Rialaig, Sue Hubbard explores in her work both the dark and the light within human experience. She evokes the perceived and the actual world through a careful attention to the detail of things - be it nature, the incidental or the everyday - and attempts to give voice to our deepest emotions and our sense of inchoate spiritual longing. Her subjects are those of love, loss and memory. She writes of our vulnerabilities, so often concealed, and through their disclosure suggests the possibility of renewal. Donald Teskey's large-scale drawings of the Cill Rialaig terrain are no landscape idylls. This body ot work, complementary to the poems, powerfully evokes a vivid sense of that remote and harshly beautiful place, confronting us with the raw forces of nature at the inhospitable edge of the world: the bruised and weathered architecture of the coastline; the ocean, foaming and restless; the cliffs, dark, ancient and enduring; depictions of a dynamic landscape at its most elemental.

Praise for The Idea of Islands:

‘Poet and artist collaborations are generally more exciting than novelist/artist ones, if only because the artist in the latter tends to be regarded primarily as an illustrator. That is distinctly not the case with The Idea of Islands where the dark, painterly, drawings of Donald Teskey and the atmospheric, but sharply observed poems of Sue Hubbard add up to something more - more in fact than a kind of joint-reportage on sense of place. The sense of place here is also the place of body and mind where, as one poem puts it, "we feel ourselves / to be made from earth / our cells are filled with water". Life and place move around and within each other becoming each other's memorable conditions.’
George Szirtes

‘Cill Rialaig is at the edge of the beautiful and atmospheric southernmost peninsula of Kerry. Sue Hubbard writes her spare poems about a harsh winter pilgrimage there, testing the body and mind to its limits. Donald Teskey depicts the landscape surfaces of the place in magnificent drawings. 'Now His Days' and 'Light Breaks Celestial' pick up the words of the poems, but the pictures could be of nowhere else. This is a magical, searching book.’
Bernard O'Donoghue

‘What Donald Teskey and Sue Hubbard have produced in The Idea of Islands is a marriage of shared lyric sensibilities and their own harmony of ideas that serves to sustain this coupling of word and image. A perfect marriage it is too, and those sensibilities are acutely attuned to the distinct and atmospheric qualities to be found out at the "edge of the whip-lashed Atlantic". The imaginative responses of both artist and writer are perfectly complementary. When the poet describes the sea as being "black as a saucer of spilt ink", the painter renders it so with all the power and drama (and dark foreboding) that the sea itself often yields. Like the islands themselves, bare and austere, Teskey's evocative, beautifully textured drawings and Hubbard's sequence of reflective and highly visual poems stand unadorned but infused by the same sense of mystery that emanates from these desolate outposts. This double focus accumulates into a vividly thematic book that, in the making, has resulted in a fine example of the craft of book-making.’
Gerard Smyth

The Idea of Islands will be published by Occasional Press in 2010.
Throughout that year an exhibition of the original drawings for the book will tour Ireland and England. At the openings of some these exhibitions Sue Hubbard will be reading from her poems.

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