I am quite dissatisfied that, having had a relatively hard winter, I didn’t seize the chance to work more on the Still Life in Ice series of pinholes. What I wanted to achieve was a collection of poems and photographs working hand-in-hand but somehow the poems didn’t come and as a result I didn’t put much in to constructing the images. Nevertheless, I did come up with one pairing which worked. As usual it has taken me some time to refine the poem and achieve the consistency and balance I sought between the haiku and the photograph. The photo didn’t work on its own (this is what I wanted to begin with); the first draft of the haiku was reasonable but, alongside the image, both the words and the photo seemed somehow diminished and disjointed. The technique of putting everything away for a few weeks allowed me to review it with fresh eyes and suddenly a small tweak to the words, a minimal crop to the image and now I have a result which pleases me to the point that I wish I had been a little more persistent while the ice was with us.

Ice haiku

Thrilling now, daring loss,

mystery unshattered.

This is why we love