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This Craft
He photographs reeds etched onto a frozen fen
trees floating on mist.
He searches for shadows and reflections
expanses of missing
what's unremembered.
In 1895 the photographer P.H. Emerson produced a last body of work, a collection of East Anglian marsh landscapes. Photographs of fugitive qualities of mist and light in a place that blurs distinctions between land and water, the images often seem themselves to be on the point of dissolving.
Drawing on Emerson's writings on optics and photographic techniques, as well as his accounts of time spent in East Anglia, This Craft reimagines the photographs' elusive, ambiguous spaces. What do we see in these landscapes? What is unseen, haunting the moment of stilled time captured by the camera?
"A poet of precision, Judith Willson intercedes between looking and seeing in these poems, calling our attention to the vagaries of perception, the mechanics of vision, and the medium of air itself, with all its shifting mists and distances." -J.R. Carpenter
"Judith Willson's spare forms, precise diction and rare skill in evoking the tones and textures of light bring Emerson's photographs to the eye with startling clarity in this exquisite sequence of poems. Fragments of an internal landscape are glimpsed, refracted through the marsh's unstable light. Anchoring the whole are the processes of photography, Emerson's craft." -Carola Luther
trees floating on mist.
He searches for shadows and reflections
expanses of missing
what's unremembered.
In 1895 the photographer P.H. Emerson produced a last body of work, a collection of East Anglian marsh landscapes. Photographs of fugitive qualities of mist and light in a place that blurs distinctions between land and water, the images often seem themselves to be on the point of dissolving.
Drawing on Emerson's writings on optics and photographic techniques, as well as his accounts of time spent in East Anglia, This Craft reimagines the photographs' elusive, ambiguous spaces. What do we see in these landscapes? What is unseen, haunting the moment of stilled time captured by the camera?
"A poet of precision, Judith Willson intercedes between looking and seeing in these poems, calling our attention to the vagaries of perception, the mechanics of vision, and the medium of air itself, with all its shifting mists and distances." -J.R. Carpenter
"Judith Willson's spare forms, precise diction and rare skill in evoking the tones and textures of light bring Emerson's photographs to the eye with startling clarity in this exquisite sequence of poems. Fragments of an internal landscape are glimpsed, refracted through the marsh's unstable light. Anchoring the whole are the processes of photography, Emerson's craft." -Carola Luther
30 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2026
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