This is what gives us time: Kevin Brophy

For this book cover, I have attempted to reference printmaking details into the illustration. The narrative of the illustration came from the second poem ‘Elena!’ from which the collection extracts its name. While this is clearly a digital illustration, the deliberate artifice is partly ironic. While attempting to create a sense of an older time, the clean digital lines of the flowers and people and bird suggest that the living things are the contemporary additions in an otherwise old place. In a similar vein, the inner cover is a repeat of the poem Elena! in Morse – refined to look like a pattern, but with all the sequential data intact. This is in keeping with the inner covers of all of GloriaSMH’s books, a reference to a time when often information was embedded both in poetry as well as in some form of encryption.

The poems themselves do not allow much much typographic intervention – except a few, such as ‘The Drowned World’ – the indented lines offering a reference to the waterline of something heavy sinking fast.

The book is set in the traditional Bembo font, that lends itself so well to the reading of Poetry.