What was said about Hansel > 'Playing with wind and tide'

"On 8 February 1877, a desperate message was handed to the Lloyd's shipping agent in Stromness, Orkney. It informed him that nine members of the crew of the Austrian vessel Peti Dubrovacki were stranded on the island of Hirta, after having been shipwrecked. The St Kildans were generously providing the survivors with food and shelter, but the subsistence economy of the islanders was so fragile that there was a real danger of starvation setting in before the arrival of spring, and the visit of the island's supply boat.

The customary way of requesting attention from the mainland was to light bonfires at the highest accessible points of Hirta, which on good days could be seen from Lewis and Harris, but presumably the February weather was too ‘coorse' for this strategy. The captain rigged a lifebuoy with a sail, and attached a bottle containing his urgent message, addressed, unlikely as it may seem, ‘To the Austrian Consul'. The lifebuoy was surely a forlorn hope, but it made landfall at Birsay, Orkney, within nine days, and consequently HMS Jackal was despatched to rescue the Austrian crew, reaching Hirta on 22 February.

In August 2008, a new wave-borne line of communication, this time between Orkney and Shetland, was launched in the form of the Hansel Cooperative's ‘Mailboats' project. The brainchild of Shetlander John Cumming, formerly principal art teacher at Stromness Academy and a founder-member of Hansel, Mailboats paired writers and artists from Shetland and Orkney to create word-vessels that would be given to the rips and tides that flow so vigorously around these northern isles. The resulting eight poem-craft were launched east of Skerries, Shetland, on 9 August, from the Pilot Us, a former seine-net and long-line trawler, following successful group readings in Orkney and Shetland, and exhibitions of the text-craft at Da Gadderie, Shetland Museum and Orquil Gallery, Rendall. Some of these word-hoard hulls have been found on Shetland foreshores already, but four remain at sea: I make regular trips to Birsay and loiter hopefully down among the waar.

The latest incarnation of the project is an elegant booklet, Mailboats. Playing with Wind and Tide from Hansel Press, which inevitably foregrounds the poetry, though the artists' contributions are well represented in photographs. (The Mailboats website provides more images of the works at www.hanselcooperativepress.co.uk, together with useful links to previous reviews and other materials.) Each pairing of poet and artist was obviously a fruitful and stimulating exchange. Mark Ryan Smith's D Sang u d Sailin Meyn finely opens the sequence, setting language afloat to encounter the corners of the world, ‘t seek common cadence we / d wirds o iddir meyn'. John Hunter's massy shield-boss bears the marks of this song.

Laureen Johnson's Islanders is a subtle poem of origins, celebrating the boats that brought the very first ‘ferry-loupers' to northern islands, with a lovely, active use of the noust-noun: ‘da boat lies weel haaled up, until dey see/if dey need noost her.' This poem was carried in Mike Finnie's blue nest of fish boxes. How does Orcadian differ from Shetland dialect as a vessel for poems? With the third poem, we can compare the two musics. Morag MacInnes of Stromness sharply asks, ‘Whit is it catches wis / sea folk? Edges?' Her song was stowed in John Cumming's sturdy craft and buoy. James Sinclair's Yarnin takes us back to the island more northerly, with a word to treasure, of a ‘wasterly swell runnin / joost a bulderation in-annunder da banks'. Roxane Permar safely sealed this yarn in a flotilla of silver bottles.

James Mainland weaves a moving monologue, from a too long married wyf, to her love elsewhere, as she writes ‘to sweetheart the sea'. Jo Jack made a delicate braid for this letter. Alison Flett's symmetrical gems were rightly trusted to Laura Drever's bauble-boat. Yvonne Gray's Cragsman risks all at the cliff-face, and his pose ‘grows large in the dying light'. He floated in Colin Kirkpatrick's braw fish.

The final pairing is a poem of some scale, John Aberdein's Praise of John Rae, stoutly encrypted as a text file, and rightly trusted to Frances Pelly's Inuit art-craft. A truly fine bulderation, in all."

'Playing with wind and tide', Nigel Wheale, The New Shetlander No. 246, Yule Issue, 2008