Acoustic Mirrors (2025)
Settings of five poems by Jacob Lund (from Acoustic Mirrors, Spectral Pixels Press, 2024)
for vocal consort (SSATBass) - 12 minutes
written for Selva Armonica
1. The Cherry Fair
2. Dungeness:
(i) Topographies
(ii) Listen Out
(iii) The Working Lighthouse
3. A Prophecy
first performance:
20 June 2025
Selva Armonica - 'Cherry Fair'
St Paul's Church, West Street, Brighton, England.
Soprano: Sumei Bao-Smith
Soprano: Lingling Bao-Smith
Mezzo: Liz Webb
Tenor: Dominic Skingle
Bass: Andrew Robinson
'The Cherry Fair'
The poem emerged from a reading of an extract from an anonymous 15th century poem, 'Farewell this World', which uses the idea of these annual fairs as metaphor for the transitory nature of existence. I think it is a relatively common trope in the writing of the late Middle Ages, from what I have been able to work out. The sense in the first stanza is of an English landscape in which, even as 'we' age, there remains a kind of detachment from those, now 'sockets' and 'bone', who are our ancestors in the widest sense. It is as if the natural imagery of 'skies' and 'blossom', markers of time, somehow leave us inert, alienated, even, from much in the way of clarity about who we think we are. The second stanza marks a turn, and in fact the poem began as a blank sonnet with this as a sestet, though in the end a pentameter line couldn't deliver the rhythmic hesitancy that I wanted as a means of echoing the poem's ideas. The priest appears as a figure who might reconnect ancient and contemporary people through a shared faith, or culture at least, (the medieval setting of a cherry fair suggests he is from pre-Reformation England), but the font is 'waterless' and its stone reveals no sign (in 'angels') of any unifying identity. Yet the 'songs', our ways of trying to express what we are in a particular moment, remain, if only for as long as the cherry harvest offers ready fruit.
'Dungeness'
This poem was written following a visit to Dungeness. Its location on that rather bleak part of the Kent coast struck me immediately as emblematic of the state of England. 'Topographies' suggests that the idea of an 'English settlement' is illusory when it is tied to ideas of national identity; the pilots' memorial there exists, and commemorates Polish pilots who flew with the RAF in World War II. The idea is that people who are now in old age can only recall the war as little children, if at all. The listening grandchildren are a scrutinizing image; the 'lovers' of the third stanza offer tentative hope. 'Listen Out' takes the image of the acoustic mirrors as metaphor for unreliable and obsolete ways in which we hear each other in relation to what it is some of us say we are, particularly with regard to history and nationhood. The second stanza leaves ordinary people not in dialogue, however misleading, but in 'silence' and under the control of our 'illusion managers' - the ideologically powerful. Finally, 'The Working Lighthouse' is perhaps the most hopeful of the three little poems in 'Dungeness', in the sense that our compassion seems to exist in a darkness created by the cruelty of contemporary discourses in relation to those from overseas, who are desperate for places of relative safety. The 'miming' of ourselves seems hesitant, as if we still need to convince ourselves of those we should, in the broadest sense, love.
'A Prophecy'
In one of the porches of Manchester Cathedral I encountered a homeless man lying in a sleeping bag. The setting is intended to intensify a sense of shame and guilt felt both by the speaker and the imagined choir, a synecdoche for people as a whole. As the poem develops, the wordless man begins to resemble a Christ figure; 'the ruins of Jerusalem', alluding to the Book of Jeremiah, serves as a warning that our collective apathy and indifference might in the end prevail, our immediate sense of shame notwithstanding. 'Jerusalem' also alludes to Blake's preface to his epic, Milton: in my poem, neither secular society nor 'the ways of God' can be relied upon to build anything of value, and yet the poem is not unalloyed pessimism: the hope lies in the speaker's 'silent,/ broken face' - a sign of recognition of a common humanity, at least.