• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Welcome to My Website
  • Phil’s Blogs
  • Projects Map
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • Newsletter
  • Contact Phil

Phil Cohen Works

  • Autobiography
  • Poetics and Other Arts
  • East London and Post Olympics
  • Generation and Gender
  • Mapping the Pandemic
  • Race Class and Imagined Community
  • The Cultural Politics of Knowledge
  • Living Maps – Critical Cartographies of the City

Graphologies – Phil Cohen with Jean McNeil

January 25, 2014 by philco

Our New book from Mica Press

Graphologies

A deliberately hybrid text, the fruit of a partnership over many years between a poet/ethnographer and a painter who have mutually enriched each other’s understanding of the meaning of place, Graphologies takes a line of thought for a walk across poetry and the visual arts, autobiography and fiction, cultural and literary studies, exploring the emotional and narrative hinterlands of the commonplace.

The sparkling Introduction outlines the rationale of its poetics, while the paintings, photographs, maps and other illustrations add an important dimension to the book, extending its appeal to a wider audience.

Part 1 is then a sequence of poems in which familiar objects, encounters, or relationships have in some way become strange or other. The poems are counterpointed with paintings by Jean McNeil which invoke a sense of transient things arrested in their moment of manifestation or imminent departure : a tide that is on the turn, a glimpse of a landscape from a train, a passing storm… She is attracted to elements of strangeness in familiar scenes: an unusual light, surprising arrangements of shapes.

In Part 2 short prose poems explore the memoryscapes of a childhood in which intimate spaces of   fear and delight become disembodied as they are refracted through the trauma of the Blitz.

Part 3,  a fictional memoir, ‘Like as Not’ features the mysterious  K. He recalls a journey of self-discovery through the surreal landscape of his childhood and youth, growing up in a dystopian society of the future where ‘soapspeak’ and ‘knowgov’ are the only permitted discourses. The pervasive sense of personal dislocation, of lack of concordance between the official map and the actual unfolding territory of a life results in a series of phantasmagoric events ending  in a suicidal sea voyage.

The sometimes hidden reference point for much of this work is the East Anglian countryside and coast where the authors have both lived over the past 20 years, providing a focus for their various preoccupations with the liminalities of the commonplace. Several critics have already had a chance to review the book.  Read what they have said here: Graphologies Critics Reviews


Phil Cohen came to creative writing through the practice of ethnography and through the painting of his partner, Jean McNeil. He has recently published On the Wrong Track? East London and the Post-Olympics (Lawrence and Wishart) and a memoir, Reading Room Only (Five Leaves). His poems have appeared in various magazines, e.g.  Agenda, Soundings, and Critical Quarterly. Material Dreams, a collection of writing on memory and narrative, is forthcoming from Palgrave,Macmillan. He is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Website and blog: www.philcohenworks.com.

Jean McNeilstarted to paint in her late thirties, studying at the Camden Institute, City Lit (with Cecil Collins) and Hornsey Art School (then Middlesex Poly). For the past two decades she has been inspired by East Anglian land and seascapes and now lives in Wivenhoe near Colchester. She has had solo exhibitions at the Wivenhoe Gallery; Les Livres and Digby Galleries, Colchester; the John Jones Art Centre, Dryden Street, Original and Highgate Galleries, London; and the Smee Gallery, Norfolk. Her work is in many private collections. Website : www.jean-mcneil.co.uk


Publication date: 18 July 2014. Recommended price: £11.99 Paperback – ISBN 9781869848026. 86 pages 23.5 X 19.1 cms with colour illustrations. Subjects: Poetry, Art, Fiction.

Publisher: Mica Press 47 Belle Vue Road, Wivenhoe, Colchester, Essex CO7 9LD Tel: 01206 826844 Email:  info@micapress.co.uk Web: www.micapress.co.uk – phone or email orders.

Distributor: Central Books Ltd, 99 Wallis Road, London , E9 5LN. Tel 44 (0)845 458 9911 Fax 44(0)845 458 9912 email contactus @ centralbooks.com web site: www.centralbooks.com – for trade orders

Filed Under: Books

Primary Sidebar

Forthcoming Events

Things Ain’t What They Used To Be

Cartographies of Violence/Rhetorics of War

Recent Books

Things Ain’t What They Used To Be

New Directions in Radical Cartography

A Long Life in the Making

Political Mindfulness: Fresh Perspectives on Multiple Crises’

There Must Be Some Way Out of Here

Phil’s Blogs

In Praise of the Heimlich Manoeuvre

Text of speech given at Wivenhoe House on June 3rd 2023, on the occasion of my 80th birthday. Reasons to be Cheerful : that so many people managed … [Read More...] about In Praise of the Heimlich Manoeuvre

UNEASY LIES THE HEAD : ON LOSING THE ROYAL TOUCH  NOW AND THEN

Note: This is a revised and updated text of an article  originally published in Livingmaps Review  and posted online in 2021. It is due to … [Read More...] about UNEASY LIES THE HEAD : ON LOSING THE ROYAL TOUCH  NOW AND THEN

ON LIVING IN A GREY ZONE

This text is an introduction to  Waypoints Volume 2 ,  a new collection of occasional writings  from the last five years due to be published  in the … [Read More...] about ON LIVING IN A GREY ZONE

Recent Posts

In Praise of the Heimlich Manoeuvre

UNEASY LIES THE HEAD : ON LOSING THE ROYAL TOUCH  NOW AND THEN

Things Ain’t What They Used To Be

ON LIVING IN A GREY ZONE

On being left behind : the haunting legacies of London 2012

Footer

Available from
EYEGLASS BOOKS
Available from
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Available from
EYEGLASS BOOKS
Available from
Compass
Available from
Compass
Available from
EYEGLASS BOOKS
Available from
EYEGLASS BOOKS

Copyright © 2023 · Phil Cohen · Site designed and maintained by Dallura Web Design