Order Nr. 138229 RESISTANCE. Simon Armitage.
RESISTANCE.
RESISTANCE.
RESISTANCE.
RESISTANCE.

RESISTANCE.

(Solmentes Press).

Illustration and Calligraphy by David Esslemont.

  • Decorah, IA: Solmentes Press, 2022.
  • 4to
  • illustrated paper covered boards, cloth clamshell box
  • unpaginated

Price: $800.00  other currencies

Order Nr. 138229

Limited to 30 numbered copies signed by the artist / printer. The typefaces used were created by designers with a connection to Ukraine. The front cover, title: Bifur - Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, digitized by Richard Kegler; the front cover, author: Arsenal - Andrij Shevchenko, Berdyansk; poem and colophon: Genau - Aleksey Popovtsev, Kyiv; and production Note: Bandera text - Andrij Shevchenko, Berdyansk.

From the artist: Writing shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Britain's poet laureate Simon Armitage responded to 'what is coming at us in obscene images through the news' with a poem titled Resistance, published in The Guardian Newspaper.

On reading the poem I felt an immediate empathy, and in particular with Armitage's repetition of the words "it's war again". This illustrated edition was created to show solidarity with the people of Ukraine and to highlight the recurrent, ubiquitous nature and folly of war.

The illustrations are montages of manipulated contemporary and archival photographs combinded with my own drawings and images. The calligraphic words, sometimes cross-written, are drawn from not only the poem but also other sources - e.g., transcripts of a British Pathé newsreel, a list of wars spanning two thousand years, Putin's declaration of his mission, the Ukrainian national anthem, news headlines, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's speech to the British parliament.

The setting of the verse lines echoes closed captions of news reports and follows Simon Armitage's layout of the poem: three-line verses with the second line indented once and the third line indented twice.