Justin Hopper & Sharron Kraus - Swift Wings - 1CD

After collaborating on Chanctonbury Rings, Swift Wings sees Justin Hopper and Sharron Kraus joining forces again, this time using the poems of Victor Neuburg as their starting point.

Victor Neuburg had two claims to fame: he discovered Dylan Thomas, and Aleister Crowley once turned him into a camel. Swift Wings: Songs in Sussex, his 1921 collection of poems, is a lesser-known artefact. But Swift Wings is, in a tiny way, special. It vibrates with the magic of nature and of ancient humankind. With imagination and history. And it is from Swift Wings that Hopper and Kraus have selected the poems on this recording.

The earthy-yet-diaphanous poems written by Neuburg and soundtracked by Kraus on this album are hymns to old gods, paeans to nature, love, wonder, and the enchantment of the Sussex landscape. After an abusive childhood and the darkness of his relationship with Crowley, Neuburg found love, freedom and happiness in West Sussex, and his new spiritual landscape became a magic of light.

Neuburg's poems shimmer with the rich colours of nature, the yellow of the daffodil, the golds, greens, violets and blues of spring, the grey of October. The fruits of nature are plucked and tasted by him, as by a child, and his ecstacy and wonder are contagious.

Swift Wings is something of an anachronistic project, and Neuburg's naivety may seem eye-rolling to some. Yet in his words we hear a brief moment of comfort experienced by a man tormented by events both personal and global - written after the isolation of a pandemic, in a restless pause between wars. Perhaps some will find something rather current in his search for solace in the  landscape. Perhaps a timeliness hides in that anachronism.

Swift Wings is a companion release to Obsolete Spells: Poems & Prose from Victor Neuburg & the Vine Press, edited by Justin Hopper and published by Strange Attractor Press.