Strangers Wave - Vik Shirley

A formal black box with text in classical Roman lettering. It looks as though it must contain funeral stationery. Black-bordered envelopes and writing-paper. Cards of condolence. Sombre sealing wax. The impression continues when you open the box and see a dark ribbon in a twisted cross holding the contents in place.

But you find instead bleak photographs of railway bridges, leaf-strewn alleyways, bricked-up windows, cemetery chapels and the worn faces of stone angels. And across them are juxtaposed strips of melancholy, fragmentary phrases in typewriter font and at all angles, just like a xeroxed punk zine. The phrases seem resonant, fateful, even prophetic, and you feel that you are reading the modernist major arcana of a dark urban tarot.

This is Strangers Wave by Vik Shirley (Zimzalla), and the photo-collage postcards are inspired by the music of Joy Division: the scenes are from Macclesfield, the home town of Ian Curtis, and there are terse, oblique allusions to his lyrics and to the eerie transcript of a tape of the singer attempting to regress to past lives.

An accompanying booklet explains the pilgrimage the poet made to places in the town connected to Curtis, and her cut-up technique, seeking ‘new expressions and meanings . . . stripped back, minimised and remixed to make something new, all the time tapping into the other-worldly, still electrifying atmosphere of the music of Joy Division.’

There was a time when ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, from its sleeve of lichen grey, was on my record player almost every day, along with ‘Read About Seymour’ by Swell Maps, ‘Where Were You?’ by The Mekons, ‘He’s Frank’ by The Monochrome Set’ and ‘Existentialist’ by Prag Vec. These cards remind me of those flat above a shop days of the long grey mac and the rain sweeping over the Pennines, and seem to me an authentic, psychically-charged response to the spirit of that time.

The publisher, Zimzalla, are a bravely experimental press who issue poetry objects. Previous issues include a ‘cog-shaped text combiner’, a fossil box, a dish of cold chips and an ‘Unclassified Psychedelic Research file from an alternative future’. This is their latest release, of ‘echoes and whispers, dimly-heard voices from the graveyard, the haunted ballroom and the psychic dancehall, the black noise of rain on railway arches and motorway underpasses’ (C D Rose).

(Mark Valentine)