Denise Levertov's Batterers is the hundred-and-first publication of the Janus Press, founded by Claire Van Vliet in 1955. The press publishes mainly contemporary writers in collaboration with papermakers and printmakers. This work is the first collaboration between Janus, Levertov, and paper artist Kathryn Lipke Vigesaa. The book includes many features familiar to followers of Janus Press and it is perhaps the Press's most dramatic work since the Tess Gallagher broadside, Death of the Horses By Fire (1984). The book provides a stage set for Levertov's blood-curdling poem, and Vigesaa's clay-paper cover centers the whole firmly in mother earth. That this work is in two distinct parts also makes it an important work of the Press. Vigesaa approached Van Vliet in 1988 or 1989 to see if they could collaborate on a project that would both stand alone and also be the culminating piece for Vigesaa's series of installations, Earthworks. She wanted to use a text stressing the need to care for the environment, and Van Vliet was her logical choice as a collaborator. Van Vliet suggested "Batterers" as a text, and Vigesaa made the necessary arrangements with Levertov. The three primary collaborators worked together on this book from the beginning. The heart of the book is a large, shaped, landscape paperwork of a volcano/woman, designed and painted in pulp by Claire Van Vliet. Katie MacGregor made the intensely pigmented pulps used to create the image and Bernie Vinzani dipped the linen muslin sheets with a shaped deckle both at the MacGregor-Vinzani Paper Studio in Whiting, Maine. Van Vliet's four pulp paintings are sewn together with heavy, bright red linen thread. Two large, overlapping sheets, each measuring twenty-four inches in length, present a dark battered mountain range, metaphorically a battered woman's body, with the tallest peak in eruption. MacGregor's black, brown, and red textured pulps provide a somber backdrop to wide molten lava in the center, suggestive of a wound in the earth/ woman from which the life blood is flowing. The thread forms ridges in the middle of each flow, while it literally holds the pages and symbolically holds the earth together, by a thread. These flows form three pools, semi-circular flaps, at the bottom of the paperwork. Folded down, these reveal the three stanzas of Levertov's poem, printed in small and large 18-point sizes of Rudolph Koch's Neuland type. The two paintings are backed by a third painting of a bright red sky, pasted to binder's board and mounted on a wooden cradle that stands upright, presenting the triptych of mountains/woman/ volcano. Below this sky there is a fourth painting of the mountain range pasted to binder's board; this can only be seen when the work is folded up. This view includes the title page and part of the colophon. The book is as beautiful closed as opened, because the closed view presents a mysterious mountain range. As in a stage production, opening this "curtain" reveals the drama. Kathryn Lipke Vigesaa's clay-paper landscape piece may be hung on the wall on two nails in any direction or it may be placed standing on a flat surface. This piece also has red in it, but muted brown earth tones capture the sense of dry, parched land. The texture is like smooth igneous rock, and the same folding is evident here as in the pulp painting.. The piece is surrounded by a black frame made by Jack Sumberg from tamarack, which he chose for its rough grain character and lacquered to give it the sheen of charred wood. The paperwork and its cradle fit nicely into the back side of the frame. The whole slides into a slip case, covered in brown Irish linen buckram printed with wood type in varying sizes of large capitals that cry out the title, the author, and the name of the press. This is a complex book on a very serious subject, and it takes time to fully understand it. I did not like the book at first, but it has grown on me in the short time that I have known it. It makes a powerful statement about our treatment of the earth and abuse of women and it is a marvelous display piece. Levertov's poem is a masterpiece of concision. The author has published the poem variously switching the second and third verses; the Janus format permits any sequence of raising and lowering the three text pools of blood that contain the three verses, so that the reader can change the order at will. Different unique copies of the work have the poem presented with the last two verses in alternate order. In part the poem is about a battered woman: A Man Sits By The Bed Of A Woman He Has Beaten, Dresses Her Wounds, Gingerly Dabs At Bruises. Her Blood Pools About Her, Darkens. Astounded, He Finds He's Begun To Cherish Her. He Is Terrified. Why Has He Never Seen, Before, What She Was? What If She Stops Breathing? The third stanza (in the copy I have seen), however, equates the woman with the Earth: Earth, Can We Not Love You Unless We Believe The End Is Near? Believe In Your Life Unless We Think You Are Dying? The Janus Press edition captures both senses of the text beautifully and dramatically. The shape of the pulp painting is reminiscent of the Press's gentle Lilac Wind (1983, co-published with Twinrocker); both unfold in the same way to reveal an expansive view of the landscape, but the similarity stops there. Here we see a volcanic mountain in angry eruption. The soft lines of the earlier work are now angular red thread zigzagging down the mountain to the pools at the bottom. Although much more complicated and life-threatening in theme, the execution of this work is just as successful. Claire Van Vliet has always been interested in mountains, and they appear in nearly every work she has produced. Visits to the west coast of Ireland and to New Zealand over the past few years have deepened her observation of the earth's rocky crust and its importance in supporting life. Along with Vigesaa and Levertov, Van Vliet is very concerned about the environment in this work, but the three artists also show here their abhorrence of violence, particularly violence against women, so widespread in human society.
