The Hollow of the Hand: Harvey, Murphy relect clamour of war

PJ Harvey’s lyrics and Sean Murphy’s photographs capture conflicts in Kosovo and Afghanistan.

Reflecting the clamour of war

The Hollow of the Hand traces travels undertaken by Irish photographer Seamus Murphy and English singer-songwriter PJ Harvey, collecting his images and her lyric slivers. The triangular geography of their journey — Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, DC (the last ‘‘the ultimate world power with its own unease at home’’) — reflects the triangular relationship of words, images and place the collaboration explores. Its sharp edges and clean lines map narratives of trauma, injury and resilience.

Harvey has long been influenced by poetry and has collaborated with other artists. Her most recent album, the celebrated Let England Shake (2011), began with research into conflicts, predominantly World War I, and witness testimony from other wars. Harvey added zither and autoharp to her instrumental repertoire and extended her contralto range into an eerie soprano, a transposition prefigured by the thin notes and rippling harp of 2007’s White Chalk.

These new instruments suggest Harvey’s artistic restlessness and contribute in this book to musical versions of dramatic monologue. The high, spooked voices of Let England Shake channel the war dead. Bright and clear amid war’s clamour and squall, words of youthful witness warble at the edges of the poetic:

Passed through

the damned mountains,

went hellwards,

and some of us returned,

and some of us did not.

Harvey’s collaboration with Murphy began with promotional portraits and a series of videos he made to accompany Let England Shake. Shot in available light, they are figurative yet unevasive. All and Everyone juxtaposes tidal churn with a misty copse and clouded moon with bedraggled roses attached to a monument, evoking Harvey’s image of ‘‘death’s anchorage’’ where ‘‘death is now, and now, and now’’. The bell-ringers of In the Dark Places pull on noose-like ropes, a silent knell beneath Harvey’s voice: ‘‘our young men hid with guns in the forests/And in the dark places.’’

The Hollow of the Hand furthers this collaboration, drawing on Murphy’s decades of photography and documentary filmmaking. His book A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan (2008) captures the effects of the Taliban regime and extends the uneasy exploration of Let England Shake, which suggests of both Britain and America that ‘‘our land is ploughed by tanks and feet / Feet marching’’; its ‘‘glorious fruit’’ is ‘‘deformed children … orphaned children’’.

The Hollow of the Hand tells plainspoken stories. The poems’ bones jut. Their narrative skeletons are exposed, fleshless. The first begins ‘‘we drove up the mountain’’, evoking a journey in pared phrases, until the sudden ‘‘purple-black flesh’’ of fallen plums darkens the road: ‘‘pushing out of their open skins’’.

Like the split plums, the poems open into disclosure, pushing through the thin skin of story to reveal sensuality and vulnerability. In The Abandoned Village a photograph of an empty house shows a girl ‘‘in black and white, but her mouth is missing, /perished and flaked to a white nothing’’. The song-like refrain asks a corn-doll ‘‘what it had seen’’, but the husked house holds the secrets of its abandoned history close.

Pockmarked, crumbled and threadbare, the rooms are full of broken evidence. Signs of injury spill like a ‘‘ball of red wool / unravelling’’, the image itself unravelling across line and stanza breaks. In Zagorka an old woman offers snippets of a monologue, her flickers of memory harvested into the poem. Ultimately, though, she ‘‘won’t let us in’’.

At first each poem faces a blank page, as though confronting the ineffable. A series of Murphy’s photographs follows these poems. The first shows a young boy, his mouth open in awe as he confronts an adult figure with a hidden face. The photo’s centre is the boy’s expression. The monstrous figure remains unexplained, perhaps nothing stranger than someone carrying a woolly rug over a shoulder. At the photo’s fringes, people get on with other things, relaxed, incurious. Like the old woman’s story, the photo reveals and repels, and like the poems, it faces a blank page, reinforcing a sense of the unknowable nature of others’ ex­periences.

The following images of Kosovo occupy both sides of the page. Wreck and detritus abut natural beauty. As in WH Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts, with its meditation on the way human suffering takes place ‘‘[w]hile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’’, Murphy’s photos frame tragedy within the indifference — or is it resilience? — of continuing lives. A horse lies dead on the road as a couple passes with plastic shopping bags. A box plays the saxophone while fire explodes from a building.

Words echo from place to place. In Afghanistan, children in rags edge closer chanting ‘‘Dollar mister, dollar mister’’, while in Washington children call their dog: ‘‘Money! Money! Money!’’ In Kabul, men gather to mourn and pray, while in Washington, a roomful of white-haired suited white men meets. ‘‘Is there a god of none and plenty?’’ Harvey asks in one poem.

The darkest photos show bodies decaying, piles of bones, skeletal remnants. In Kosovo and Afghanistan, the camera dissects cadaverous buildings, their skin peeling back over joists and rack.

German philosopher Theodor Adorno warned against the aestheticisation of atrocity. While fire pounding through a roof becomes, in the book’s cover image, beautiful, Murphy’s photos of the remnants of murdered bodies refuse such transformation.

Does looking away respect or disrespect lives wrecked and taken?

In his work on photography, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes suggests that ‘‘the incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance’’.

In this verbal and visual documentation there is frisson and stillness, schism and repair. Things approach and recede, like the narrative the old woman might tell, but doesn’t. What remains is disturbance.

Felicity Plunkett is poetry editor at UQP.

The Hollow of the Hand

By PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy

Bloomsbury, 231pp, $35, $85 (HB)