Seeing Paul Nash at Tate Britain, by Mark Wilson

The Wood on the Hill, by Paul Nash (England) 1912

Seeing Paul Nash at Tate Britain
​
For you it was an earthly
paradise; & that’s what matters.
 
To imbue that spinney upon that
clump or hillock with mystic
properties, a circumambient
‘godliness’, was, undeniably,
your prerogative.
 
No-one could deny an artist
such liberties, aesthetic or otherwise.
 
A nation or culture creates
its own divinities, or else it
gets crash-landed. You’d seen
enough of mustard-gas & air-raids,
transportation in a cock-pit 
of immeasurable brush-colour, 
& light transcending the body’s
manifold fragility.
 
Vision is presence,
a hushed ambience through
leaves & branchwork.
Art being noumenon of the
regional: ubiquitous,
unashamedly local.
 
For you, cartography’s the
truer eucharist, a contoured
& petaled All-Heal spread out
for the nations; &, ultimately,
 
that's what matters.

​Mark Wilson

Mark Wilson has published four poetry collections: Quartet For the End of Time (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), Passio (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), The Angel of History (Leaky Boot Press, 2013) and Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). He is the author of a verse-drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two, as well as a tragi-comedy, Arden. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, Tears in the Fence, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Syncopation, Epignosis Quarterly, Dodging the Rain, Syncopation, Anvil Tongue, The Ekphrastic Review, Rasputin and Le Zaporogue.