Paper, Stone, Forge: a Poem in the Shadow of Tony Cragg’s Sculpture Stack by Ian Duhig

With all sculptures, the only interesting material is the human brain

– Tony Cragg, interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist

this poem’s feet walked printlessly past

its erasure poem shadow through drafts blowing down

my karst stone paper Cloud, the lyric I of this paleo-

storm, the waterjet-cutter

of our Yorkshire weather,

there since before Yorkshire.

Even now its winds, razor-

edged with quartz sand and feldspar

ice-flecks, blast black inky clag, verbiage,

glacial shale and mudstone to a skeleton

of millstone grit stacks. Now, light tricks

Brimham’s Rocks out in the masks

of a shadow menagerie like the shadows

Cragg moulded in wax as if millstone grit.

Soft the Hare nested in its early form, shape-

shifts through the clock’s sun-shouldered

curve to carve from darkness flesh and horn

solid as the Ox’s flank, the Tiger’s Head. Dog,

Frog and Tortoise morph into the thinking Sphinx.

Why do we look like this, Cragg? It asks.

He raises his pencil, takes a line for a walk

down the never-travelled limestone

pavement of his new sketchbook page,

turning it over in my mind like a new

year or an idea, the question,

Why do we look like this?

_________

Ian Duhig is an award-winning British poet whose most recent collection, An Arbitrary Light Bulb (Picador, 2024), was a Poetry Book Society Choice and a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Year. A twice winner of the National Poetry Competition and recipient of the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, he is celebrated for his wit, formal ingenuity and social engagement.