Have Been & Are ~ Brook Emery
Book Layout and Design, Cover design and Illustration, GloriaSMH Press
The phrase ‘have been and are’ is taken from the last sentence of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species – ‘Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved’. This book cover was envisaged to represent this, while integrating it with the poet’s desire to reference Hokusai’s woodcut print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, which is mentioned a couple of times in the book. Marrying this with the sense of the ocean that frames much of the book, the illustration seeks to depict a meeting of these three ideas.
The feature image – an ink sketch of the Armadillo – was one of the rejected concepts for the cover.
