Aphex Twin - Flim

cards for sale

for more info on these cards, email ereganphoto@gmail.com
packs of easter cards of 4 for £3
any card £1.50, any 2 cards £2.

Untitled - Pete Regan

Atmospheric art film by Pete Regan, my brother. Melancholy in non-places. Beauty in the bleak:

I scrubs - E Regan (poetry pamphlet)

Hi all,

My pamphlet came out in May 2010. It was also the month I discovered I was pregnant, thus making me forgetful of all things poetry, and focused on baby.

If you're interested in purchasing it, here's the link:

http://www.erbacce-press.com/#/eli-regan/4540399102

and click either 'add to cart' or click on the cover image and order it.

Some lovely things writers said about it:

'Regan has studied photography, so she understands the urge to capture a moment that is charged with latent meaning, that balances on the tightrope of too much information and too little. She is, like a good photographer, alive to the minor malfunctions of the world, the anomalies that shape our lives much more than we realise. Her subjects are often trapped within a metaphorical frame, their lives trammelled by duty, convention, inertia. And yet still they dream, still they escape.

Not content to inhabit photographs, Regan also inhabits a photographer, becoming Diane Arbus in the throes of three photographic encounters. This brazen embodiment reveals the photographer’s duality: the urge to remain true to a situation, yet knowing it must be manipulated in the pursuit of that ‘truth’. Similarly, Regan gives herself licence to invent in the pursuit of her own truths.

Beyond the frozen moment, Regan is also a storyteller. Her poems offer oblique, fragmentary insights that can be rolled out into whole lives. But like all poets, and many photographers, she sifts her way through life in search, not of answers, but of laden questions. She leaves our heads full of pictures that have a life of their own' - Greg Leach, author of 'Twice Told Tales'

'Eli Regan writes highly original, filmic poems that explore the perspectives of outsiders. With great empathy she often constructs worlds through the voices of her protagonists; whether it is a Madrid prostitute, or a girl living in the slums of New York at the end of the nineteenth century. Regan gives voices to those denied a voice, and in doing so creates an alternative world that is genuinely subversive and compelling' - Amy McCauley, work has appeared in 'Rialto', 'Obsessed with Pipework', etc

'Regan's poems are equally concerned with eye and voice. Her interest in documentary photography gives her a striking way
into other people's lives, other people's stories.' - Michael Symmons Roberts, author of 'Corpus', broadcaster - Radio 4.

The Dawning by Megan Taylor

One of the immediately striking things about The Dawning (by Megan Taylor) is its present tense narrative, naturally enforcing the frenetic pace of the story and leading the reader into the unknown along with the narrators.

Set in a wintry backdrop of the Peaks, on New Year’s Eve, it tells the story of the Haywood family, who, one by one are inwardly crumbling with the pressure of family and their own lives. With great insight, Taylor weaves the multiple perspectives of each member, meticulously, and so creates a fuller picture of the level of disconnection found within this particular family, and with each reader will identify and empathise:

Stella, the mother with young baby Mia, suffering from post-natal depression. Philip, the father – at the cusp of a mid-life crisis, looking for pleasure elsewhere with tragi-comic results. Nicola – the teenage daughter, shy, unsure, lacking-in-confidence desperately trying to fit in and emulate her more glamorous friend, Christine. And 11-year-old Zac, in some ways the most sensible of the lot, acutely aware of his family falling to pieces and in his own child-like, protective way fighting against this.

This multiple perspective has echoes of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, where we get to know each character a lot more intimately, than if it was a simple, straightforward narrative. It also alerts us to the unreliability of the narrators. On the one hand, by Stella’s account, we see Nicola as a beautiful, young teenager. Nicola disagrees, in a heart-wrenching but typically teenage body-dysmorphic way. In her descriptions of herself she is ‘dowdy’, ‘more like a fishwife’ and with ‘clothes […] safe and uninspired’.

Taylor’s unravelling story is so compelling, because we are left, on cliff-hangers constantly catching up with the characters own moral dilemmas in the backdrop of a claustrophobic home, a sophisticated party, a teenage-get together in the woods. We don’t know and we want to know. The Dawning has cinematic overtones – not only in its suspense, but the sheer quality of the pictures it creates:

‘Yapping and growling, the animals’ dark, glistening bodies had tumbled over and into one another as they reeled and snapped against her legs. For a moment, they had seemed more like giant rats than dogs, like nightmare creatures – or pieces of the night itself…’

I read The Dawning in one sitting. It wouldn’t surprise me if you did too.

The Dawning by Megan Taylor is published by Weathervane Press. Megan’s blog is at http://megantaylorblogstories.blogspot.com

Long Discarded

This image is from a short story I wrote and illustrated (with photos) a while ago. I'm hoping to make it into a few books and sell them at some point.

Fog, Extending

Fog, Extending

I. Victoria Park, WA4

Empty pavement
finds you walking on it.
The shape of an unlit
streetlight guides you,

brown railings separate
you from the weir.
Turning, two lone
green benches greet you,

above, the trees stark
against Hokusai sky.
Unseen waters
tumble, and

G
I
N
G
E
!

cries a railing.

Dog walkers enter and
fade into the trees,
characters in an
absurdist play.

Sign, yellow spells:

DANGER!
Risk of Falling
Risk of Drowning.

You feel at home
in nothing places.

II. Birmingham New St

I held on to you like the empty bottles
and wrappers you wish to discard
on a long train journey
with many changes.

III. Montserrat, Spain

Things emerge.

Autumnal branches.
Montserrat’s high arches,
Its Daliesque peaks.

The bells shatter the
bone-creaking ground.

An old man stands
a few feet from
the guided tour.

Dignified,
this bulgy Bill Murray,
wears his shorts
his yellow polo
his hat
a Disney princess bag

despite the cold
the rain.


IV. Victoria Park, WA4

I sit on a bench.

Traffic and voices
dissolve into the distance.

One tree towers with
drooping branches.

The day hides its scattered clouds.

Chopped tree trunks protrude from the short grass;
guests that won’t leave a finished party.

A cyclist flies circling the rose bushes.

I could be anywhere. This comforts me.
I could be anywhere. This saddens me.

_--
E Regan

Writing Sessions

Hey!

Nice one for joining me, Kate & Claire! Maybe you can make me look less sad by posting comments when I post a poem or story! ; )

Look fwd to interacting here. x

Is life absurd?

I was asked this question at 18. I answered ‘NOOOOOooooooooooo’ with all my might. I answered it in the form of a 1st year Philosophy essay to be handed in and marked. I remember the mark. 67. I think the PhD student marking it was just pleased to see something other than a screaming ‘YEEEEEeeeeeeees’ in the pile. My ‘NOOOOOOOOOoooooooo’ might have been entirely inarticulate, but as a ‘No’ it stood out.

I remember the only guy I liked in the ‘Yes’ pile was Camus. Because Camus, even though a firm believer in the banality and absurdity of life, was an advocator of raging against this meaninglessness with fury. Even though I was still in the ‘No’ pile, I liked his rebellion. It was very teenage-like and passionate, and Lord knows I respected intensity back then.

I quoted not just philosophers, but musicians, artists… and the whole theme of absurdity being reaffirmed in popular culture although still fumed in disagreement. ‘We sit here stranded though we’re all doing our best to deny it’- I quoted Dylan.

Now, life seems reasonably absurd. Arbitrary. Ridiculous. Silly. Laughable. Although maybe this is not as terrifying a prospect as I once thought, and to think that was what made me cling so fiercely to my unusual ‘No’.

I haven’t been in work/study since February 2009. I’ve had 7 interviews in the past few months (none since July) and in every one I wanted to get up and do a bit of a jig, and say ‘Why the farce? I’ll do whatever you want… I’ll sing, I’ll go get you a coffee, I’ll shear your pet goat… just don’t let me go through the farce of this bloody interview!’… because you’re asked questions that seem to require some sort of prodigious power to answer them… and then you happen to talk to someone who got the post or who works at the same place in a similar role, and their answers they gave are blindingly obvious and not very dissimilar to the ones you gave.

Life does seem pretty vacant without some sort of definite structure. I’m not asking for any God-like totality or crystal-clear profundity, just some sort of vague job that will be as absurd as the next but with some sort of activity to make it allusively appropriate to my somewhat creative persona.

Although my answer now belongs begrudgingly to the ‘Yes’ bloc, I’m sort of glad I was once adolescently entrenched in the ‘No’ camp. Camp Nou.