Covodes 1-19

If poetry, literature, philosophy and criticism are to be worth anything right now, they will be ruthless and uncompromising in stripping away the forms of present self-evidence. Elliptic, analytical, fragmented but intensely disciplined, acutely aware of recent events and their latent rather than their official meanings, Robert Hampson’s most recent poems do just that. Here a late modernist poetics and a lucid, critical politics come together with especial force and sustained if often bleak nuance.

(Andrew Gibson, Visiting Professor at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide, 2017-20)

Covodes 1-19 is a sequence of 19 experimental odes, written during 2020. They offer a documentation of the first year of Covid-19 from multi-faceted perspectives in the form of fragmented, ‘public voice' poems.

The sequence explores the experience of lockdown through the evocation of a series of enclosed spaces - a bunker, a submarine, a space-station, a colony on Mars, drawing parallels between these and our domestic, day-today spaces. Among other things, the poems investigate the necessarily mediated experiences produced by lockdown and the corresponding reliance on the technologies of video-conferencing and social media.

The Covodes were recorded over zoom, while the cellist, Joanna Levi, recorded her compositions for Suite 1 for Solo Cello with a relatively simple desktop microphone in her study. Cameron Macintosh edited the two files for the CD. This collaborative process registers an aspect of the new and altered day-to-day life, changed working practices under the social restrictions of living under Covid. For Levi, this project allowed her to explore her consuming interest in Bach's music. Taking Bach’s suites as a springboard, she conveys the sense of anxiety engendered by Covid through a wandering tonality in order to suggest the distortion of normal life we endured over the last year.

The Covodes book comes in an express edition of 250 copies (£10.00). This includes a recorded CD version in which the poems are in dialogue with Joanna Levi’s compositions Suite 1 for Solo Cello. The Covodes book is also available in a signed Art Edition of 20 copies (£90.00, 12x12”), featuring 2 tipped-in art prints by John Vernon Lord (1939) in addition to the CD. The recording (with Levi’s Cello accompaniment) is available for online streaming and purchase at www.arteryeditions.bandcamp.com (£5.00).