Plan B (a selection) at Triskel Gallery Space

A second chance to see a selection of the acclaimed exhibition of “photoetry” commissioned by Triskel Arts Centre in 2010, and originally shown in the ESB Sub-Station in Caroline Street.

Plan B presents us with a distinctly new genre ‘photoetry’ – it is a unique collaboration between Pulitzer prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon and the highly acclaimed Scottish photographer Norman McBeath.

As Muldoon says in his introduction to the beautifully presented book, the poems were not created in response to the photographs, or vice versa, but rather the two elements were allowed to find their own oblique correspondences. Muldoon writes of McBeath’s fine-grained photographs that they have an intense immediacy; “the medium does not impose a sense of mediation”. He says that “there is, rather, an invitation to meditate”.

Plan B was published by Enitharmon Press, one of Britain’s most enterprising independent literary presses. Enitharmon is the name William Blake gave to a character representing spiritual beauty and the inspiration of the poet. ‘Enitharmon is a rare and wonderful phenomenon, a press where books are shaped into artefacts of lovely handiwork as well as communicators of words and worlds.’ Marina Warner

Norman McBeath is a photographer who specialises in people and places. The National Portrait Galleries in London and Edinburgh hold over seventy of his works in their permanent collections. He lives in Edinburgh.

Paul Muldoon has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.” Among his many awards for poetry was the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. Paul was awarded the 2017 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He is now Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts.