ex Oceano – CD cover artwork, quotes and references
Brochure and site design for ex Oceano
CD brochure artwork collaboration: Michaye Boulter, Tasmania artist and Sue Anderson, Lynchpin Coordinator.
Brochure and CD box artwork, layout and design brought together by Jenny Manners and Sarah Owen of Sarah Owen Designs, Hobart, Tasmania.
the Title
Thanks to Dr Graeme Miles, Lecturer, Classics, University of Tasmania for Ancient Language advice.
Quotes selected for the cover design are from the following works:
Breath
Breath, you invisible poem!
Pure, continuous exchange
with all that is, flow and counter flow
where rhythmically I come to be.
Each time a wave (that) occurs just once
in a sea, I discover I am.
You, innermost of oceans,
you, infinitude of space.
How many far places were once
within me? Some winds
are like my own child.
When I breathe them now, do they know me again?
Air, you silken surround,
completion and seed of my words.
‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ Part II, I, in Rilke, Rainer Maria, In Praise of Mortality: Selection from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy, Riverhead Books, NY, 2005, p107.
Innermost of Oceans : screen print, © Evelyn Kolijn
The Wide Ocean
Ocean, if you were to give, a measure, a ferment, a fruit
of your gifts and destructions, into my hand,
I would choose your far-off repose, your contour of steel,
your vigilant spaces of air and darkness,
and the power of your white tongue,
that shatters and overthrows columns,
breaking them down to your proper purity.
Not the final breaker, heavy with brine,
that thunders onshore, and creates
the silence of sand, that encircles the world,
but the inner spaces of force,
the naked power of the waters,
the immoveable solitude, brimming with lives.
It is Time perhaps, or the vessel filled
with all motion, pure Oneness,
that death cannot touch, the visceral green
of consuming totality.
Only a salt kiss remains of the drowned arm,
that lifts a spray: a humid scent,
of the damp flower, is left,
from the bodies of men. Your energies
form, in a trickle that is not spent,
form, in retreat into silence.
The falling wave,
arch of identity, shattering feathers,
is only spume when it clears,
and returns to its source, unconsumed.
Your whole force heads for its origin.
The husks that your load threshes,
are only the crushed, plundered, deliveries,
that your act of abundance expelled,
all those that take life from your branches.
Your form extends beyond breakers,
vibrant, and rhythmic, like the chest, cloaking
a single being, and its breathings,
that lift into the content of light,
plains raised above waves,
forming the naked surface of earth.
You fill your true self with your substance.
You overflow curve with silence.
The vessel trembles with your salt and sweetness,
the universal cavern of waters,
and nothing is lost from you, as it is
from the desolate crater, or the bay of a hill,
those empty heights, signs, scars,
guarding the wounded air.
Your petals throbbing against the Earth,
trembling your submarine harvests,
your menace thickening the smooth swell,
with pulsations and swarming of schools,
and only the thread of the net raises
the dead lightning of fish-scale,
one wounded millimeter, in the space
of your crystal completeness.
Pablo Neruda: The Wide Ocean from Canto General