Dendokron
Poems by Linsey Shaw-Miller
Images by Serena Smith
[Leicestershire, England]: Serena Smith, 2015. Edition of 35.

28 x 22 cm; 10 pages. Single section hand-stitched bookwork. Hand-coloured stone lithographs by Serena Smith. Poems by Lindsey Shaw-Miller printed by offset lithography. Text pages printed on Fabriano 5 210gsm. Lithographs printed on Fabriano 5 300gsm. Blind emboss “Serena Smith signature on front free end page. Bound in tan stiff paper cover with title printed on front cover. Numbered on colophon. Signed by artist and poet. Laid in folded paper pamphlet with notes on “Dendokron”. Laid in folded “Dendokron” print, signed and numbered by the artist.

Serena Smith: "’Dendokron’ is a collaboration between artist Serena Smith and writer Lindsey Shaw-Miller. Far from one being illustrative of the other, the poems and images were generated by a series of brief encounters. Serena Smith's series' of work on the themes of Labyrinth, Hodegetria and Psalter inspired the ideas for the poems, and the images in ‘Dendokron’ are a further development in kind. What might be held in common is an interest in the encroachment of abstraction into reality; the coexistence of obscurity and clarity in reaching for a direction; and the presence of myth and belief in the layers of our lives.”

Notes: “All of these poems, with their references to specific, narrated mythologies or liturgies, have undercurrents that interrogate the limits of religious and mythological belief. Sight, direction and self-ownership are common themes, if at times encrypted in the verse. Greek words have sometimes been manipulated to be more inclusive or more primitive, as in the title of the book, ‘Dendokron’, or by using a plural rather than a singular.

“.. the poems are also a homage to Greece, the source of so many wild, inspiring and brutal ideas that have captured the imagination, even the soul, over centuries; and a place with the most understated, mystical capacity to heal the damage that some of those ideas have wrought.”
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