I wish …

Nicholas GarlandPublication: May 24th, 2007

£50.00 / £75.00

Nicholas Garland writes: "There are many snatches of songs and lines of poetry which lodge in your memory, and that you find running through your head when you're not thinking of anything much. They are companionable, like old friends. I don't remember how I learned a couple of the verses included here; probably I picked them up at school. A year or so ago, I looked them up on the internet and found that they, and two other verses like them, had been included in The Poet's Tongue, an anthology edited by W.H. Auden and John Garrett. They were not exactly as I remembered them, but perhaps, like folk songs, they never have existed in a fixed version. Auden and Garrett do not say anything about their origin, but at the end of the four verses add the words "and so ad infinitum …" I wrote down and illustrated the two I remembered, and began inventing the rest."

Limited Edition – 210mm (h) x 297mm (w)

The edition is limited to 400 numbered copies, the first 150 of which are signed by Nicholas Garland. It comprises 18 black and white woodcuts, with accompanying verses, is printed on 170gsm Satimat Club paper, and is bound in buckram-lined boards.

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I wish …

"Over the years, Nick Garland has recreated the animal farm of politics with his gift for seeing our rulers as something else – a rabbit, a bull, a pig – and nailing down their characters in a line or a gesture. It is a form of wit, a way of cutting the high and mighty down to size. I wish … is a playful variation on a similar theme. Using an open-ended verse form he came across in Auden and Garrett’s anthology The Poet’s Tongue, and illustrating them with a series of brilliant woodcuts, Garland has written a highly original book of nursery rhymes. They are nursery rhymes for adults but told from a child’s point of view – the grasshopper’s view of the camel, the tadpole’s view of the hippo – the view from the bottom up, in short, just like the cartoonist’s take on the great." – Al Alvarez

"To me Nick Garland is the cartoonists’ cartoonist. He has such a beautiful and interesting line, and the products of his imagination are always so unexpected. Next to that, he has a verbal dexterity that continues to colour your mind long after you’ve looked up from the page — that dark, refreshing pool of image and text. His book I wish … has all of this and more. It is actually a masterclass in felicity: look here, those of you who can take delight in delight for its own sake; buy this book and pass it on, and buy another and keep it for yourself, those of you who always have time for a perfect distillation of elegance and wit. That is what you get when you buy Nicholas Garland’s book. Buy three. An extra one for me." – Andrew O’Hagan

Three of the eighteen spreads in I wish …

Nick Garland - Excerpt from 'I Wish...'

The Waywiser Press

Excerpts

Three of the eighteen spreads in I wish ...

Nick Garland - Excerpt from 'I Wish...'

The Waywiser Press

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